Stefka Kaloyanova, Irene Onyancha, Gauri Salokhe, Fynvola Le Hunte Ward, Johannes Keizer

The new AGRIS initiative which was launched at the Expert Consultation in October 2005 has defined three main areas of intervention to improve international information systems in agricultural science and technology: Advocacy, Capacity Building and Content Management. Content management, the management of agricultural science and technology information, has various needs: standards and methodologies for interoperability and facilitation of knowledge exchange, tools to enable information management specialists to process data, information and knowledge. This paper describes some of the efforts which have been made in this area over recent years.

Imma Subirats, Irene Onyancha, Gauri Salokhe, Johannes Keizer

The AGRIS Network is an international initiative based on a collaborative network of institutions, whose aim is to promote free access to information on science and technology in agriculture and related subjects. The paper illustrates how the Open Access (OA) and the Open Archive Initiative (OAI) models can be used within the AGRIS Network as a means of solving the problems of dissemination and exchange of agricultural research outputs. The lack of adequate information exchange possibilities between researchers in agricultural sciences and technology represents a significant weakness limiting their ability to properly address the issues of agricultural development. The OA model promotes the dissemination of research output at international, national and regional levels thus removing the restrictions placed by the traditional scientific publishing model. This paper presents the possibility to address the accessibility, availability and interoperability issues of exchanging agricultural research output.

Caterina Caracciolo, Margherita Sini, Johannes Keizer

International organizations like FAO are intrinsically multilingual. FAO is currently experimenting with semantic-oriented technologies based on ontologies, with the purpose of integrating data across various information systems and providing better services to end users. However, in order for these technologies to be used in real-life scenarios, models and tools for accommodating and managing multilingual data are needed. This paper analyzes the requirements for the treatment of multilinguality as resulting from the experience we gained at FAO.

Hilke Stuempel, Gauri Salokhe, Anne Aubert, Johannes Keizer, Andrew Nadeau, Stephen Katz, Stephen Rudgard

Capacity and institution building is a core function of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO). FAO has recently started the “Capacity and Institution Building Portal” to provide structured access to information on FAO’s capacity and institution building services and learning resources. To ensure that the Portal can be searched by users and to enable interoperability with other recognized educational repositories, an Application Profile (AP) was created conforming to available and commonly used standards, to describe agricultural learning resources. This article presents the AP, provides an example of an FAO learning resource described and displayed using FAO Learning Resource AP, and presents the lessons learned.

Stefka Kaloyanova, Gian Luigi Betti, Francesco Castellani, Johannes Keizer

CDS/ISIS is an Integrated Storage and Information retrieval System of United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which is widely used for managing bibliographical reference ensuring high quality content. The main purpose of this paper is to present the work recently carried out by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in collaboration with Associazione per la documentazione le biblioteche e gli archivi (DBA) in Italy to make Web CDS/ISIS based applications compliant to the OAI-PMH. After a brief evaluation of some of the existing solutions, the paper describes the methodology chosen and proposes an open source, easily parametrizable plug-in tool, which can be adapted to expose metadata from a general structure CDS/ISIS database using the OAI-PMH protocol. It concludes with expressing the importance and implications of this work for the whole CDS/ISIS community and specifically for the participating centres from the AGRIS network. In addition, this work assures that semantically rich metadata for agricultural science and research publications based on the “AGRIS Application Profile” can be handled by the OAI protocol.

Valeria Pesce, Ajit Maru, Gauri Salokhe, Johannes Keizer

Providing easy access to updated, accurate and semantically meaningful information about organizations working in the agriculture sector is of primary importance in agricultural information management. Many databases of these organizations already exist but none are comprehensive and all differ in coverage (often overlapping), semantic organization, being up-to-date, quantity and quality of the information they provide. In addition, only very few information systems share and exchange data among themselves. This paper describes a distributed architecture which minimizes duplication in information storage and flow and improves quality of the information provided. In this architecture the data describing an organization are stored in a file as an XML description based on a specific metadata set, and access to these distributed files is facilitated by a central registry file. The proposed metadata set is also discussed, with special focus on those aspects that help to make the architecture coherent.

Margherita Sini, Gauri Salokhe, Christopher Pardy, Janice Albert, Johannes Keizer, Stephen Katz

This paper describes the work done within the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on providing an ontology-based navigation to the Food, Nutrition and Agriculture (FNA) Journal. The aim of the revised navigation was to provide more efficient and effective browsing of the Food and Nutrition Publications using a knowledge model to guide the user with concepts and relationships relevant to a specific subject area. With this approach, data from two different bibliographical databases were reused, by merging and unifying them and make them better accessible to users. A preliminary metadata merge was needed to combine all the information into one system in order to produce a metadata-ontology. Resource Description Framework Schema (RDFS) has been chosen to exploit semantic relationships e.g. the possibilities of browsing the data in different ways (by keywords, categories, authors, etc.), and the creation of a multilingual concept-based advanced search.

Caterina Caracciolo, Marta Iglesias Sucasas, and Johannes Keizer

This paper reports ongoing work on using an ontology as a mechanism to bridge various types of country-based information systems at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The type of geopolitical information addressed by this work include country international classifications, country names in the five FAO languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French and Spanish), and other geographical information such as water bodies. Although the data required for the geopolitical ontology is already available, it is scattered across many information systems, which are often not clearly connected to one another. The expected advantage of using an ontology to achieve interoperability is that it can accommodate semantic relationships (between countries and geographical entities) that can be exploited for inference. Moreover, in virtue of the standardized semanticsoriented languages used to encode the ontology, it will provide a highly sharable and reusable resource for the international community. This paper describes the geopolitical information to manage, presents the requirements imposed on the ontology and gives details about the ontology prototype. Finally, it discusses design issues and draws some preliminary conclusions.

Stefka Kaloyanova, Michal Okoniewski

One of the problems in collaborative networks of documentation centers is the lack of interoperability between the different types of systems and applications used. The metadata is created in various places, time and using a number of tools and applications, data structures, content types, formats, and standards that may vary according to local needs. Exchange specifications that identify a minimum set of common requirements can be used for to facilitate the exchange and re-use of data. This paper summarizes FAO’s experience in the efficient management and use of multilingual bibliographic CDS/ISIS databases, applying DC metadata standards and tools for search and exchange of bibliographic metadata. It explains in detail different approaches on how the bibliographic data from the CDS/ISIS databases can be converted and exported according to the Dublin Core (DC) and Agricultural Metadata Element Set (AgMES) based metadata set for cohesive and efficient platform-independent exchange of metadata. The second point is how different database applications can be united in a common search interface using DC elements. In addition, export features of DOS-, WINDOWS- and WEB-based CDS/ISIS application systems tools are compared. A number of examples on how the data in various input and storage formats can be reformatted without any modifications to the existing CDS/ISIS database and applications. The experience was gathered while working with FAO’s on-line library catalogue (FAOBIB) and the International Information System for the Agricultural Sciences and Technology (AGRIS). The solution adopted was to use the Dublin Core (DC) and Agricultural Metadata Element Set (AgMES) based metadata set for the platform-independent exchange of metadata between existing databases.

Henryk Rybinski, Stefka Kaloyanova, Stephen Katz

This paper is dedicated to the main achievements and outputs, developed as a result of a close cooperation between FAO and ICIE. The main result of this cooperation in the area of publishing ISIS databases on the Web is the WWW-ISISPL - a cgi-bin program written in C, which is a rapid Web Application Development tool for publishing CDS/ISIS databases on the Internet. Many of the existing systems based on WWW-ISIS software share a common purpose: the creation of a more efficient, harmonized environment for the input, management and dissemination of metadata. This objective lends itself to the idea of progressive integration under a common software application system such as the integrated library system WebLIS, developed by ICIE as a Library Management Tool and distributed by UNESCO.

Asanee Kawtrakul, Aurawan Imsombut, Aree Thunyakijjanukit, Dagobert Soergel, Anita Liang, Margherita Sini, Gudrun Johannsen, Johannes Keizer

AGROVOC is a multilingual thesaurus developed and maintained by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. Like all thesauri, it contains some explicit semantics, which allow it to be transformed into an ontology or used as a resource for ontology construction. However, most thesauri, AGROVOC included, give very broad relationships that lack the semantic precision needed in an ontology.

Anita Liang, Margherita Sini, Chun Chang, Li Sijing, Lu Wenlin, He Chunpei, Johannes Keizer

This paper introduces the criteria and the procedures for mapping the Chinese Agricultural Thesaurus (CAT) to FAO’s multilingual agricultural thesaurus AGROVOC. It proposes modifications to the interthesaurus mapping rules provided in the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) specification.

Irene Onyancha, James Weinheimer, Gauri Salokhe, Stephen Katz, Johannes Keizer, Boris Lauser

This paper focuses on the AGRIS Application Profile (AGRIS AP), a standard created specifically to enhance description, exchange and subsequent retrieval of agricultural Document-Like Information Objects (DLIOs). The AGRIS AP provides a minimum interoperability layer through which agricultural information can be described and exchanged.

Raphael Volz, Rudi Studer, Alexander Maedche, Boris Lauser

We present a novel approach of extracting a domain ontology from large-scale thesauri. Concepts are identified to be relevant for a domain based on their frequent occurrence in domain texts. The approach allows to bootstrap the ontology engineering process from given legacy thesauri and identifies an initial domain ontology that may easily be refined by experts in a later stage.

Boris Lauser, Andreas Hotho

This paper presents an approach to automatically subject index fulltext documents with multiple labels based on binary support vector machines (SVM). The aim was to test the applicability of SVMs with a real world dataset. We have also explored the feasibility of incorporating multilingual background knowledge, as represented in thesauri or ontologies, into our text document representation for indexing purposes

Gauri Salokhe, James Weinheimer, MariaGrazia Bovo, Moira Agrimi, Johannes Keizer, Stephen Katz

This paper proposes that for scientific and technical information resources, a well-structured and high-quality metadata record contains enough information to find that resource on the Internet, and as a consequence, no additional human labour is needed to create or maintain any links. Research was performed by creating a control group of records from the Online Catalogue of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and searching them in various ways in Google and Metacrawler.

Andrea Zisman, John Chelsom, Niki Dinsey, Stephen Katz, Fernando Servan

In this paper we present our experience of using Web services to support interoperability of data sources at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. We describe the information bus architecture based on Web services to assist with multilingual access of data stored in various data sources and dynamic report generation.

Boris Lauser, Tanja Wildemann, Allison Poulos, Frehiwot Fisseha, Johannes Keizer, Stephen Katz

This paper presents our ongoing work in establishing a multilingual domain ontology for a biosecurity portal. The paper focuses on introducing a comprehensive, reusable framework for the process of semi-automatically supported ontology evolvement, which aims to be used in follow-up projects and can eventually be applied to any other domain.

Aldo Gangemi, Frehiwot Fisseha, Ian Pettman, Johannes Keizer

This paper outlines a project (involving FAO, SIFAR, and CNR) aiming at building a formal ontology in the fishery domain. The ontology will support semantic interoperability among existing fishery information systems and will enhance information extraction and text marking, envisaging a fishery semantic web. The ontology is being built through the conceptual integration of existing fishery terminologies, thesauri, reference tables, and topic trees.

Irene Onyancha, Johannes Keizer, Stephen Katz

This report outlines a proposed metadata framework for resource discovery of agricultural resources, and in particular to describe information resources in agricultural sciences.

Irene Onyancha, Fynvola Le Hunte Ward, Frehiwot Fisseha, Kafkas Caprazli, Stefano Anibaldi, Keizer Johannes, Steve Katz

This report outlines a proposed metadata framework for resource discovery of agricultural resources, and in particular to describe documents and document-like resources in agricultural sciences.