[Nouvelle publication] The AGROVOC Concept Server Workbench: A collaborative tool for managing multilingual knowledge

25 July 2008 - Ontology plays an important role in the enhancement performance of systems, addressing issues such as knowledge sharing, knowledge aggregation as well as information retrieval and question answering. This paper presents the AGROVOC Concept Server Workbench (ACSW) for multilingual ontological concept construction and maintenance. The ACSW is a web 2.0 based application consisting of two main functionalities that are user management and ontological knowledge management (i.e. concept, scheme, relationship, export, search, validate and consistency check) in order to maintain the knowledge acquisition life-cycle in food and agriculture domain. Knowledge is stored in the form of multilingual concept hierarchy and also kept in the OWL format in order to exchange between machines and to do reasoning. This workbench uses Prot¨¦g¨¦ API as an OWL framework. Moreover the Ontology Game conceptual framework is also presented in order to acquire ontology terms more pleasant.

  First Call For Papers - SWAP 2008

16 July 2008 - 5th Workshop on Semantic Web Applications and Perspectives

FAO-UN, Rome, Italy (15-17 December 2008)


The Semantic Web is currently one of the most interesting and ambitious challenges that the scientific and technological community is facing. While great progresses have been made in terms of consolidation of base philosophy and infrastructure, new issues, technologies and tools are emerging.

These issues include creating, presenting and managing Semantic Web content, making semantics explicit in order to automatically integrate data from different sources, and to search for information based on its meaning rather than its syntactic form.

New and advanced methods, models, tools, and technologies for services related to creation, access, retrieval, integration, and filtering of Web content are being developed at the intersection of relevant disciplines that are making the Semantic Web fly, such as Artificial Intelligence, Databases, Distributed Computing, Multimedia Systems, Natural Language Processing, and Human-Computer Interaction.

For more information visit the related Web site.

  [Nouvelle publication] The AGROVOC concept server: rationale, goals and usage

8 July 2008 - The main objective of the AGROVOC Concept Server (CS)is to create a collaborative reference platform and a one-stop shop for a pool of commonly used concepts related to agriculture, containing terms, definitions and relationships between terms in multiple languages derived from various sources. This paper aims to address the issues.

  Full access to 2426 articles and publications, now available at http://www.fao.org/agris/search

30 June 2008 -

The latest AGRIS Search Engine update includes important data from the SciELO Network, a major online repository of Latin America and Caribbean scientific journals. The AGRIS collection is enriched with the first bunch of articles harvested from the Brazilian Open Archives Data Provider and they all include links to the full text. The first 1758 articles on agricultural sciences can be easily retrieved by accessing this link:

http://www.fao.org/agris/search/search.do?query=%2Bcenter%3A%28XS%29&method=Search

Other interesting agricultural data subsets have been published that are coming from the FAO catalogue and two AGRIS Resource centers whose data was missing for some time. These are INIA/CENIAP Venezuela and ICAR in India. Their data can be retrieved using the Search Assistant and selecting the relevant AGRIS Centre name and applying other filters as needed.

  [Nouvelle publication] Achieving OAI PMH compliancy for CDS/ISIS databases

23 June 2008 - This paper was already announced in 2007, but we announce it again as it has now been published in the Emerald journal. The main purpose of this paper is to present the work 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 with the OAI-PMH. CDS/ISIS is an Integrated Storage and Information Retrieval System of Unesco, which is widely used especially in Latin America and Africa.

  FAODOC full text documents are now freely accessible from the Universal Digital Library!

4 June 2008 - The Universal Digital Library (UDLIB) is a result of the Million book project making free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books, available to everyone over the Internet. It is now granting open access to online available documents from FAODOC, including 9742 books, 4762 and analytics from books, 3297 journal articles and some Web resources, field documents etc. The documents can currently be consulted through the mirror site in the United States. Shortly all other mirrors will be updated accordingly and documents will be browsable at www.ulib.org.

  [Nouvelle publication] Questions nouvelles, priorites et engagements dans le secteur de l'e-agriculture

29 May 2008 - M. Anton Mangstl, Directeur de la Division de l'¨¦change des connaissances et du renforcement des capacit¨¦s, explique que, sans la d¨¦termination des d¨¦cideurs, le monde en d¨¦veloppement et, en particulier les populations rurales pauvres, ne pourront pas r¨¦ellement profiter des avantages de l'e-Agriculture.

  [Nouvelle publication] Agricultural information management standards website: an initiative to facilitate interoperability and improve coherence

29 May 2008 - Over the past few years, the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has been
working on the development of semantic standards in
metadata and controlled vocabularies in the agricultural domain. At present, there are a number of parallel and dispersed developments in standards, tools and systems for managing agricultural information.

The aim of the Agricultural Information Management Standards (AIMS) website is to disseminate
different standards and other information to
support these standards.

  [Nouvelle publication] Analysis of e-agriculture survey

29 May 2008 - In late 2006, an online global survey to determine the scope and priorities for the WSIS Action line on e-Agriculture was conducted by an inter-agency Working Group. Most of the over 3400 respondents were unfamiliar with the term 'e-Agriculture; but nearly all respondents had suggestions on potential definition and benefits, as well as on priority areas for action. Perceptions of e-Agriculture focused on information and communication processes more than on technologies and tools. Subject areas mentioned included farming practices, market information, training, statistics, and science/research. Stakeholder
groups identified included producers, rural service providers, scientists, and policy makers. Benefits included both generally enhanced information exchange and communication processes and specifically agriculture-related benefits such as market access and food security. e-Agriculture was also seen to contribute to broader development goals. Future priorities included developing virtual communities and networks, capacity building in the use and application of ICT, and defining and advocating e-Agriculture initiatives.

  AgriFeeds has a new "Global Issues" section!

23 May 2008 - AgriFeeds has recently introduced a new functionality to provide customised multilingual feeds on current Global Issues. This service provides ready to use news feeds on subjects of current interest such as Biofuels, Avian Flu, Transboundary Diseases and Hunger. AgriFeeds, the agricultural news and events aggregator, can be used to browse and filter news and events from several agricultural information sources. Furthermore, it allows creation of customised feed that can be easily read with a feed reader or embedded into a Web site.

  Another step for FAO towards Semantic Web (requires installation of Firefox add-ons)

16 May 2008 - The articles published on the Food, Nutrition and Agriculture (FNA) Web now make use of Semantic Web techniques such as RDFa (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/). The selected articles connect the user with information retrieved from other well known Web sites such as Amazon, Del.icio.us, Flickr and YouTube, in order to obtain links to books, pictures and videos of other resources relevant to the articles themselves. In addition to this, if more information about the authors is available, the revised Web site allows to automatically view their pictures and add them as contacts in Outlook or Yahoo contact lists. By using RDFa or other microformats, the articles of the FNA Web site have become more "interactive" with the Web, and their content can be employed to help the user find materials related to them. This new technique of interaction with the Web pages is accessible by specific tools or browsers plug-ins, such as the Firefox add-ons like Fozzbot.

  [Nouvelle Publication] D'AGROVOC à l'Agricultural Ontology Service / Concept Server - Un modèle OWL pour la création d'ontologies dans le domaine de l'agriculture

16 May 2008 - This paper illustrates the conversion from a traditional thesaurus in agriculture (AGROVOC) to a new system, the Agricultural Ontology Service Concept Server (AOS/CS). The Concept Server will serve as a multilingual repository of concepts in the agricultural domain providing ontological relationships and a rich, semantically sound terminology. The Food and Agriculture Organization recently developed the underlying model for this new system in the Web ontology language OWL. In this paper, we describe the purpose of this conversion and the use of OWL and highlight in particular the core features of the developed OWL model. We go on to explain how it evolves and differs from the traditional thesaurus approach.

  Recent success at Instituto Nacional de Investigación Agropecuaria (INIA) in building Institutional Repository using WebAGRIS

15 May 2008 - The AGRIS Secretariat recently supported the conversion of INIA's local database into WebAGRIS. This work included running of the WebAGRIS application, the mapping of the local database fields to the WebAGRIS fields and the migration of the local application/metadata to WebAGRIS. Further steps will include the installation of the OAIAGRIS plug-in and the harvesting of INIA's Repository through Open Archives Initiative - Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). The OAI compliancy not only open the metadata for harvesting by AGRIS but also by any service providers in the open access framework. The lessons learned from this experience underline that the whole process of building Institutional Repositories and bringing them to OAI-PMH compliancy should not only be regarded as a support to the migration process but also an activity that includes capacity building in tools (WebAGRIS, OAI Plug-In) and standards (AGRIS Application Profile, OAI) for improved interoperability. Additionally, one output of the project was the inclusion of INIA's records in the AGRIS Repository.

  Avano is harvesting FAODOC full text documents

28 April 2008 - Avano, a marine and aquatic sciences OAI harvester, now offers access to electronic resources about marine and aquatic sciences. The resources available in Avano come from the OAI harvesting of over 200 Open Archives and a number of commercial editors. The first harvesting was done in batch mode producing a legacy subset on marine and aquatic sciences subjects from FAODOC (only full text documents) in XML DC format. The initially loaded subset includes 4644 legacy FAODOC records that are searchable using Avano search engine. The next harvesting of FAODOC by Avano is expected shortly and will be executed automatically. This project is part of the Open Access international movement which aims at making scientific documentation accessible to a broad public through free publishing on the Web.

  Workshop on Learning Technology Standards for Agriculture and Rural Development (AgroLT 2008), September 19, 2008

19 September 2008 - 19 September 2008
In the field of agricultural education, specifications and standards produced in the area of agricultural learning technologies have not yet been widely adopted and implemented. Sharing, preserving and reusing learning information among a large number of different systems and repositories would not only lead to wider dissemination of learning technology standards for educational applications but also help reaching a potential consensus of related work by comparing and harmonizing similar/competing approaches. The aim of the Learning Technology Standards for Agriculture and Rural Development (AgroLT) 2008 Workshop is to bring together researchers and implementers that are working on the design and development of technology-enhanced learning systems and services to support the needs of the agricultural and rural communities. Its objective is to serve as a discussion forum where interested experts will present the results of their work and establish liaisons with other groups that are working on related subjects outlining the potential of the agricultural domain as an application field for learning technologies. For more information please visit related Web site.

  Special Session of the Agricultural Ontology Service Initiative

26 August 2008 - 26 August 2008
A "Special Session of the Agricultural Ontology Service Initiative: semantic problems and semantic solutions in agricultural knowledge and information products" will take place as part of the IAALD-AFITA-WCCA Conference. The aim of this session is to showcase practical applications of semantic tools. The contributions will be of specific relation and relevance to agriculture and related subject areas and are not expected to be generic papers about semantic tools.

  Agricultural Learning Repositories E-Conference (May 2008)

24 April 2008 - 5 June 2008
Making learning resources available online on a global scale, could be an enabler for the development and welfare of agricultural and rural populations. One mean to achieve this aim, is the development and promotion of a global infrastructure that will facilitate sharing and reusing of learning resources on topics related to agricultural and rural development. To this end, the experience of stakeholders that are involved in the development and operation of agricultural learning repositories would be of extreme value. These stakeholders can promote and share guidance, standards, technologies, tools, recommendations, and good practices in a variety of topics: Designing, Developing, Adapting, and Repurposing Learning Resources; Setting up Learning Repositories using Open Standards and Technologies; Populating Learning Repositories with Reusable Learning Resources and Interoperable Metadata; Designing and Implementing a variety of Quality Assurance Procedures and Criteria for Learning Resources; Inter-connecting Learning Repositories in Global Federations to share and exchange Resources and Metadata; and Deploying Regional Portals that provide Access to Learning Resources in Repositories around the world through Federated Services.

The aim of the e-Conference on Agricultural Learning Repositories (AgLR 2008) is to initiate the dialogue around these topics, involving organizations and individuals that are active in the field of agricultural learning repositories.

The AgLR 2008 e-Conference is going to be an electronically facilitated discussion that will take place through a DGroups mailing list. It is the first of a series of events that are supported and promoted by the Agricultural Learning Repositories Task Force.