[Nueva Publicacion] A Web-based tool to manage multilingual thesauri: the example of AGROVOC

10th biennial International Conference (ISKO 2008), August 5th-8th, 2008, Montreal (Canada)

  [Nueva Publicacion] Scielo articles available to the agricultural community using OAI-PMH in AGRIS AP XML Format

This article reports a new way of getting access to SciELO full text journal articles using AGRIS AP XML format to harvest SciELO metadata and to include them into the AGRIS repository.

It covers the following main steps of the work carried out:

• Selecting about 43 journals with agricultural thematic from the Web site of SciELO;

• Defining the methodology for harvesting;

• Harvesting legacy data and then doing incremental harvesting for the new data from the selected SciELO
journal articles for inclusion in the AGRIS XML repository;

• Inclusion of SciELO articles and open access to them through the AGRIS search portal at
http://www.fao.org/agris/search/search.do?query=%2Bcenter%3A%28XS%29

• Testing and proposals for improvement and future use of this feature.

We share the methodology used, problems encountered, and the expected benefit. This work proves that semantically rich metadata for agricultural science and research publications based on the ¡°AGRIS
Application Profile¡± from the SciELO repository can be handled by the OAI-PMH protocol. It shows how the selected subset of metadata created with an ISIS application can be harvested through OAI-PMH protocol, which in turn allows for further creation of additional services by giving greater access and
visibility to SciELO data in the new AGRIS AP format compared to the used DC format.

The strategy that we adopted was to adapt BIREME¡¯s OAI-PMH plug-in for direct generating of AGRIS AP XML
from the SciELO application. The existing BIREME OAI-PMH plug-in interface was upgraded to accept and
expose metadata using AGRIS AP in addition to the existing DC schema. This approach was elegant but
required more time for realization and implementation by BIREME and FAO staff.

  [Nueva Publicacion] Comparing human and automatic thesaurus mapping approaches in the agricultural domain

Knowledge organization systems (KOS), like thesauri and other controlled vocabularies, are used to provide subject access to information systems across the web. Due to the heterogeneity of these systems, mapping between vocabularies becomes crucial for retrieving relevant information. However, mapping thesauri is a laborious task, and thus big efforts are being made
to automate the mapping process. This paper examines two mapping approaches involving the agricultural thesaurus AGROVOC, one machine-created and one human created. We are addressing the basic question “What are the pros and cons of human and automatic mapping and how can they complement each other?” By pointing out the difficulties in specific cases or groups
of cases and grouping the sample into simple and difficult types of mappings, we show the limitations of current automatic methods and come up with some basic recommendations on what approach to use when.

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