AOS Prototypes

Description

The Fishery Ontology will focus in integrating existing fishery and aquatic resources terminology in the Fishery domain. The systems to be integrated are: the "reference tables" underlying the FIGIS portal, the ASFA online thesaurus, the fishery part of the AGROVOC thesaurus, and the oneFish community directory. The Fishery Ontology Service is assumed to be a key feature of the Enhanced Online Multilingual Fishery Thesaurus, which undertakes the problem of accessing and/or integrating fishery information that is already partly accessible from dedicated portals and other web services.

Objectives

To develop a fishery ontology service that maps and harmonize fishery terminology to make intelligent information integration possible from different fishery information systems and portals.

Expected results of the prototype

• Information brokering and/or information integration: for example, unified querying of heterogeneous thesauri, multiple search over different document databases
• Conceptual navigation within terminologies and terminology-controlled resources (documents, sites, etc.), for example, highlighting of different senses, viewpoints, and contexts of use
• Automatic or customised construction of user profiles, with possibility of automatic delivery of new or updated documents or site addresses

Partners involved in the project

The Fishery Ontology will be developed in collaboration with FAO Fisheries Department (FIGIS), ASFA Secretariat, the oneFish service of SIFAR, and the Ontology and Conceptual Modelling Group at IP-CNR.

Crop-Pest Ontology

Description

The Crop-Pest ontology will mainly be used in crop-pest domain. The prototype is expected to improve search on the citrus related information systems and databases. The ontology will cover publications and images in the domain of citrus, citrus pests and other pest domains. The ontology will be tested in existing applications to see how well users respond to ontology assisted search. The Extension Digital Information Source Web-site (EDIS -http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu) of Florida agricultural extension publications and the Distance Diagnostics and Identification System database (DDIS- http://ddis.ifas.ufl.edu) of crop-pest images will be used for testing the ontology.

Specific objectives of the Crop-Pest Ontology prototype include the following:

• Objective 1: Develop an ontology for citrus covering the citrus publications in EDIS, and images of citrus pests and other related images in DDIS.



• Objective 2: Follow and test a methodology for construction of the ontology.



• Objective 3: Implement the ontology using both a proprietary development tool and standard knowledge representation languages.



• Objective 4: Develop an experimental information extraction system for analyzing image captions associated with DDIS images.



• Objective 5: Develop a user interface for searching EDIS/DDIS using the ontology.



• Objective 6: Explore exchanging information and merging ontologies with other AOS projects (fisheries project).



• Objective 7: Evaluate this interface by testing it on the EDIS Web site, and by testing with DDIS users.

Expected results of the prototype

• An ontology for the crop-pest domain, which is based on citrus but can be generalised to other crops.
• A user interface for ontology assisted search
• An evaluation of methodology and knowledge representation languages for building this AOS prototype
• A natural language processing system for information extraction
• A demonstration of exchanging information among two different AOS projects
• An evaluation of the effectiveness of ontology assisted search in an established electronic agricultural information system.

Partners involved in the project

The Crop-Pest Ontology prototype will be developed in collaboration with the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, University of Florida. The prototype is expected to be completed by March, 2003.

Anti-Microbial Ontology

Description

The Anti-Microbialontology will mainly be used in microbiological domain. The project focus on the ontology usage and unification by implementing a combined ontology for two domains, natural anti-microbial compounds from the A/OL project and growth behaviour of micro-organisms as modelled in Combase. (Combase is a system for modelling and simulating microbial growth,)

The objective for this project is to offer search access to reliable knowledge on natural anti-microbial compounds, including references to documents.

The motivation of this prototype is to demonstrate the use of ontologies for searching information, to show the process of cross-domain mapping of ontologies, and to prove the advantage of integrating ontologies across adjacent domains for searching reliable information

Expected results of the prototype

• The dedicated domain ontology for the Combase project,
• A common domain ontology for the microbiological domain, consisting of the shared concepts of A/OL and Combase
• Demonstration of improved search capacity by delivering, for at least three representative search profiles. These are a) a search without using an ontology to guide the search b) a search based on the bare A/OL ontology c) a search based on the AOS ontology, being the enhanced A/OL-Combase ontology.

Ontologies are delivered in RDF or OIL-DAML format.

Partners involved in the project

The prototype will be developed in collaboration with Agrotechnological Research Institute (ATO), Wageningen, Netherlands. The prototype is expected to be completed by July 2002.

The main reasons for using existing projects like A/OL and Combase is to speed up the realisation of a pilot and to benefit from expertise and experience in ontology mapping, integration and ontology development.