AGROVOC E-Conference, May - June 2007

Background

The AGROVOC Thesaurus was developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Commission of the European Communities (CEC), in the early 1980s. AGROVOC is a multilingual structured thesaurus of all subject fields in agriculture, forestry, fisheries, food and related domains (e.g. environment). It consists of words or expressions (terms), in different languages and organized in relationships (e.g. "broader", "narrower", and "related"), used to identify or search resources. Its main role is to standardize the indexing process in order to make searching simpler and more efficient, and to provide the user with the most relevant resources. Presently, it is updated by FAO roughly every three months. AGROVOC can be downloaded freely for non-commercial use. It is available in TBX, SKOS, MySQL, TagText, ISO2709, XML, and Microsoft Access formats.

AGROVOC is the foundation that underpins the development of the Concept Server (CS) project. Using the knowledge contained in vocabulary systems and thesauri such as AGROVOC, the CS will be able to develop specialized domain-specific terminologies and concepts that will better support information management in the Web environment. A key objective is to add more semantics to the thesaurus, for example, by expanding and better specifying the relationships between concepts.

In light of these new developments and the need to understand the user requirements, FAO is organizing an AGROVOC E-Conference. The outcomes of the conference will be discussed in the Eighth Agricultural Ontology Service Workshop to be held in September of this year.

Goals and aims

The aim of this conference is to bring AGROVOC users together to share what they would like to see improved in AGROVOC and the direction it should take. The E-Conference will allow people from all the different corners of the world, who otherwise might not be able to travel to regular meetings on AGROVOC, to voice their ideas and thoughts for the betterment of AGROVOC. The ultimate goal of the conference is to assess the direction the work on development of AGROVOC as a thesaurus and a concept server should take.

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

Agenda

Following agenda will be used to facilitate the discussions during the Conference.

Phase 1 -- 2-4 May 2007: Introductions, stage setting
Introduce outline agenda, introduction of objectives and goals, introduction, current information on how AGROVOC is being used and self-introduction of participants.

Phase 2 -- 7-18 May 2007: AGROVOC Services and functionalities

• What additional functionalities and services should be provided in terms of AGROVOC formats, services on the AIMS website?
• How can the current services (and web services) be improved?

Phase 3 -- 21 May - 1 June 2007: AGROVOC content and multilinguality management

• What areas of AGROVOC content need to be further developed?
• How to manage relationships which are attached to only one language?
• Do we need guidelines on how to add concepts in any language (making it independent of English)?
• How can the current workflow be improved?

Phase 4 -- 4 - 15 June 2007: Community building

• What would be the roles and terms of requirements for each role in the future management of AGROVOC as part of the concept server?
• What should be the internal mechanisms for validating concepts in the concept server?
• What kind of training needs to be provided to the centres managing the different language versions?

Phase 5 -- 18 - 29 June 2007: AOS workbench
The discussion will focus on testing the current AOS workbench and gathering feedback on how it can be improved.

Contributions on each phase close on the last day of the phase. Each session will be followed by a short report documenting the major ideas and contributions from the email exchange. A final report will be issued after the conference.

Language

The language of the E-Conference will be English. Due to the limitation of D-Groups to handle Rich Text emails, it is requested that all posts be made in "Plain Text Format".

How to participate?

The E-Conference is open to all interested members of the community. A time-based mailing list has been set-up. You can join the list by entering your email address in: http://www.dgroups.org/groups/fao/agrovoc-e-conference.

Conference facilitators

• Gudrun Johannsen - Documentation Officer at FAO
  Gudrun has been working on the AGROVOC Thesaurus since 1990, and also participated in its translation into German. Currently she is responsible for the content management of AGROVOC. As a documentalist, she is in charge of cataloguing and subject indexing FAO documents for the FAO Online Catalogue, and giving training in the use of knowledge organisation systems. She holds MS in Agronomy as Plant Production and Protection Specialist.


• Laszlo Gabor Papocsi - Head of Information Management Division, Godollo Agribusiness Centre of St Stephen University, Hungary.
  Laszlo Gabor Papocsi graduated from Agricultural Sciences and later received his doctorate degree in Agro-Economic sciences. He became engaged in agricultural information management by setting up a regional telecenter and starting off national technical development projects in 1997. Since 1998 he has been collaborating with FAO and IAALD as regional/national coordinator on a regular basis. Laszlo has managed over a dozen large-scale IT projects in agriculture in the last decade, lately performing eFarmer (eContent programme) Safefoodnet (FP6) projects coordination duties in Hungary. He was also in charge of AGROVOC translation to Hungarian. Today, Laszlo is managing a high priority e-Government project to introduce electronic claim submission services for the Hungarian Paying Agency in order to enable farmers to submit their CAP area based payment requests online.


• Gauri Salokhe - Information Management Officer at FAO
  Gauri holds BE in Industrial Engineering and ME in Information Management. Her work deals with creation of metadata exchange standards, providing advisory services on implementation of these standards, and facilitating sharing of information using common standards, tools and methodologies. She is strongly involved in the work of AGROVOC content management.


• Margherita Sini - Information Management Specialist at FAO
  Margherita has been working on the AGROVOC Thesaurus since 2003, dealing with all aspects of the management of the thesaurus, including its enrichment, revision, and related dissemination activities. In particular, she is in charge of its technical maintenance, conversion into different formats, multilingual availability, distribution and provision of services to users, together with mapping activities between AGROVOC and classification schemes and other thesauri. She is currently working on the project aiming at the evolution of the thesaurus into a more semantic structure (the AGROVOC Concept Server), together with the release of new guidelines, maintenance tools and services, as well as its integration within semantic web applications and interaction with other terminology resources.