Eighth Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS) Workshop on "7 years of AOS: Achievements and Next Steps", Rome, Italy, 21-22 September, 2007

Background

The purpose of this two-day Agricultural Ontology Service workshop is to bring together Information and Knowledge Managers from Agricultural Institutions, who are working on development of semantic standards and their application. This workshop will focus on assessing the work done since the first workshop of 2000 in Rome to date. The achievements of the past seven years and the lessons learnt will be used to pave the road for the next steps.

At its inception, the Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS) was intended to function as a reference tool which structures and provides normative agricultural terminology and information exchange standards in multiple languages for use by any number of different systems. The AOS was envisioned to help increase the efficiency and consistency of describing and relating multilingual agricultural resources, to decrease the random nature and increasing the functionality for accessing these resources, and to enable sharing of common descriptions, definitions and relations within the agricultural community.

Since 2000, there have been various achievements within the AOS initiative such as:

• The coverage of AGROVOC thesaurus has been dramatically extended to cover more topics, language and user base.
• Within this year, the Food and Agriculture Organization will release the AGROVOC concept server for distributed management of multilingual concepts and relations.
• The AGRIS application profile as a data exchange format for document-like objects has been released and is being used by partners within the community as the de-facto standard.
• Application Profiles for events, learning resources and organizations have been released for comments while those for projects and experts are currently being formulated.
• The Agricultural Information Management Standards Web site has been published.
• Ontology-based web applications have been tested and published.

All these activities are documented at: http://www.fao.org/aims.

However, there is still a lack of coherence and consistency in the work being done by FAO and its partners. The main objectives of the two day workshop are to:

• assess the current status of the AOS and other ontology related projects in the domain of agriculture (in its broadest sense);
• form a taskforce with interested partners from the community of practice who want to collaborate in the future development and management of various AOS projects; and
• establish guidelines and projects that the taskforce should carry out in the coming years.

Programme

• 7 years of AOS: Achievements and Next Steps: Johannes Keizer, Food and Agriculture Organization [View | Download]
• VIVO Ontology -- Jon Corson-Ricket, Cornell University [View | Download]
• Towards Agricultural Knowledge Service with Ontology -- Asanee Kawtrakul, National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre, Thailand [View | Download]
• GFIS : Collaborating on standards -- Johannes Keizer on behalf of the GFIS Steering Committee [View]
• Automatic Annotation of Agriculture Text Segments Using AGROVOC -- Ahmed Rafea, The Central Lab for Agricultural Expert Systems [View | Download]
• Global Observation Data Integration with Lexicographic and Geospatial Ontology -- Masafumi Ono, Tokyo University [View | Download]
• Geopolitical Ontology -- Marta Iglesias, Food and Agriculture Organization [View | Download]
• Organizations Registry -- Valeria Pesce, Global Forum on Agricultural Research [View | Download]
• DEAL -- T. V. Prabhakar, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur [View | Download]
• Agrifeeds -- Gauri Salokhe, Food and Agriculture Organization [View | Download]
• NeON -- Caterina Caracciolo, Food and Agriculture Organization [View | Download]
• Workbench: Application for managing Agricultural Ontologies -- Margherita Sini and Boris Lauser, Food and Agriculture Organization [View | Download]
• Agricultural learning repositories and LOM AP -- Nikos Manouselis, Agricultural University of Athens [View | Download]
• Conceptual framework for implementing ontology and applying Dspace to enhance Thai Agris Information service -- Aree Thunkijjanukij, Kasetsart University [View | Download]
• AGROVOC-NAL mapping -- Willem Robert van Hage, Vrije Universiteit, Faculty of Sciences [View | Download]
• CAT-AGROVOC Mapping -- Chang Chun, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences [View | Download]
• Scientific names as vehicles to access information about plants: obstacles and solutions-- Bob Allkin, Kew Gardens [View | Download]
• Ontology Engineering Applications -- Enrico Motta, Open University [View | Download]
• Building communities around Ontology development projects -- Pankaj Jaiswal, Cornell University [View | Download]
• AOS Community -- Margherita Sini and Gauri Salokhe, Food and Agriculture Organization [View | Download]
• CNR Semantic IntraWeb Project -- Aldo Gangemi, National Research Council [View | Download]

Report

• Final Report [View]