Seventh Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS) Workshop on Ontology-based knowledge discovery: Using metadata and ontologies for improving access to agricultural information, Bangalore, India, 9-10 November, 2006

Introduction

The goal of the Seventh AOS workshop is to provide a platform for implementers to demonstrate how ontologies can extract and acquire additional knowledge from existing agricultural information systems. It aims to bring together research communities, with special focus on agriculture, whose members are interested in efficiently capturing knowledge and in creating representations and formalizations that can be useful for reasoning and knowledge discovery.

The workshop focused on:

• Decision-support tools
• Knowledge extraction techniques
• Metadata and accurate knowledge mark-up
• Ontology application
• Ontology learning
• Ontology modelling
• Question-answering systems

Background

The benefits of ontologies can only be fully exploited if they are used efficiently within information systems for extraction or discovery of "embedded" knowledge. In today's exponentially growing information world, there is a mounting need to extract the most important information in the shortest possible time. It has become vital to have systems that are able to provide the most relevant results, while sieving through mushrooming information systems, websites, publications, forums, blogs etc. Although cataloguing and indexing resources are important steps, it is becoming increasingly difficult to accomplish these tasks due to the lack of skilled personnel, the cost of cataloguing and the rapid growth of the available information resources.

Considerable work has been done to date in the area of knowledge capture through the use of subject and process ontologies in the agricultural domain. The AOS project covers, under its name, ontologies on Food and Nutrition, Food Safety, Animal and Plant Health, Fisheries, etc., each of which captures knowledge in a specific domain area of agriculture. The complete multilingual AGROVOC Thesaurus, in the process of being made available in the form of an ontology, is rich with translations, synonyms and relations. All of these ontologies have been used in information systems to provide improved access to information. However, much of this can be further enhanced through the efficient use of ontologies for extracting the unknown and hidden pieces of knowledge, not only for providing efficient search results to the users but also for iteratively improving the ontology itself. We can achieve this only through the explicit formalization of domain knowledge through its elicitation from experts and by linking the ontologies to actual or instance data.

The activities of the AOS initiative are documented at: http://www.fao.org/aims.

Programme

• The Agricultural Ontology Service and its vision - Johannes Keizer, FAO, Italy
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• Rough Set based Decision Tree for Identifying Vulnerable and Food Insecure Households - Rajni Jain, NCAP, Pusa, New Delhi, India
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• Organizing and Implementing on the Thesauri Mapping Project - Chang Chun, CAAS, China
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• Using UML for Ontology Construction: A case study in Agriculture - Francois Pinet, Cemagref, France
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• Incorporating ARGOVOC in DSpace-based Agricultural Repositories - Nabonita Guha, DRTC, India
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• Metadata Framework for Agricultural Resources Information System (AgRIS) - A.K.Choubey, NIC, India
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• Ontology development and use for efficient information input and retrieval - Augustine, Monsanto Research Center, India and USA.
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• Networked Ontology Project for Fisheries Alert System - Gauri Salokhe, FAO, Italy
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• OntoViz: Visualizing Ontologies and Thesauri Using Layout Algorithms - Prabhakar T.V, IIT Kanpur, India
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• Dynamic Integrations of Crop Data and Corresponding Meteorological Data based on a Standardised Data Exchange Framework - Seishi Ninomiya, Japan
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• Implementation of Semantic Network Dictionary System for Global Observation Data - Shigenobu Tachizuka, University of Tokyo, Japan
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• Heuristic Approach for Automatic Metadata Capture of E-books - ARD Prasad, DRTC, Bangalore, India
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• Examples of FAO ontology applications - Gauri Salokhe, FAO, Italy
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• Application of Web Ontology to Harvest estimation of Rice in Thailand - Takuji Kiura, NARC, Japan
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• Designing the Team-oriented Ontology Management System with Ajax Technology - Zong Wang, GDAAS-IST, China
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• AOS Workbench - Gauri Salokhe, FAO, Italy
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Report

• Final Report
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