Margherita Sini, Gudrun Johannsen, Gauri Salokhe

AGROVOC is a Multilingual Agricultural Thesaurus developed by FAO. AGROVOC was basically "born" in English, or at least was (and still is) oriented to Western-European languages (mainly EN, ES, FR). However, over the years, the need of translating it in multiple languages arose, in particular in the non-European Chinese and Arabic, as these are official FAO languages.

Gauri Salokhe, Irene Onyancha, Boris Lauser, Margherita Sini, Johannes Keizer

This document provides reasons and examples why the use of AGRIS Application Profile is recommended instead of simple Dublin Core to exchange metadata about agricultural document-like information objects.

FAO

This document contains the requirements and a proposal for elements that can be used for exchanging event metadata within the Agricultural Community. The requirements are outlined and consequently used for the creation of Events Application profile (Events-AP).

Morten Hulden

The task to identify a subset of about 400 terms highly relevant to crop wild relatives was performed as a continuation to an earlier project where a set of about 11400 term was extracted from on-line sources. Terms with high relevance were grouped into themes, roughly corresponding to Agrovoc (top level) categories, or indicatives of the thematic sources from which the terms were collected (biological, geographical on-line dictionaries etc), with an attempt to balance the number of terms between the groups. For the import into the ontology structure the themes were converted to namespaces in order to preserve the grouping and allow manipulation within ontology client programs on terms based on namespace grouping. Before the import the namespaces were slightly modified and adapted to some other existing ontologies. In addition to selecting relevant terms and definitions, definition of vertical and horizontal relationships between the terms was performed. Terms were also linked to sources (uris) through Dublin Core extensions of the ontology structure. The export from sql to rdf/owl was done with a script written in Perl that extracted the terms, descriptions, sources from the database, plus vertical hierarchy, term synonyms and other variants, as well as some simple horizontal relationships and produced an import file for Protégé in rdf/owl format. The resulting subset of terms was provided as a number of files; a main file containing core structure, object and data type definitions and term data in separate files per namespace, suitable for import by an ontology client program such as Protégé.

Fynvola Le Hunte Ward

This document explains why metadata is important and how it is used by search engines.

Gauri Salokhe, Irene Onyancha, James Weinheimer, Barbara Richards, Fynvola Le Hunte Ward

The AGRIS Application Profile is a standard created specifically to enhance the description, exchange and subsequent retrieval of agricultural Document-Like Information Objects (DLIOs). It is a format that allows sharing of information across dispersed bibliographic systems and is based on well-known and accepted metadata standards.

Stefano Anibaldi, Gauri Salokhe

This document provides detailed technical information for converting bibliographic data from local databases into valid AGRIS DTD compliant XML records.

Stefano Anibaldi, Gauri Salokhe

This is the Document Type Definition corresponding to the guidelines presented in the AGRIS Application Profile Document. It defines the record structure with a list of legal elements for the AGRIS Application Profile and validates the XML inputs from AGRIS resource centres.