CALL FOR PAPERS: Special Session on Agricultural Metadata & Semantics

The aim of the Special Session on Agricultural Metadata and Semantics of MTSR'07 is to bring together researchers and practitioners that are working on agricultural knowledge production, organization, and exchange from a Semantic Web perspective.


For more information about topics and deadlines please see: http://infolab-dev.aua.gr/mtsr07/

  Publishers Commit to Bringing Free Access to Scientific Research to Developing World

10 July 2007 - Many developing countries lack access to information and training that can help save lives, improve the quality of life, and assist with economic development. To address this disparity, more than 100 STM publishers, including Elsevier, Springer and Blackwell and three UN organizations (WHO, FAO and UNEP) announce today the extension of programs that provide free, or almost free, access to online peer-reviewed journals. Information technology leader Microsoft announced its support of technical assistance to enhance access to online research for scientists, policymakers, and librarians in the developing world.

The three sister programs – HINARI (research on health), AGORA (research on agriculture) and OARE (research in the environment) provide online research access to more than 100 of the world’s poorest countries. All three of the programs have official commitment from the partners until 2015, marking the target for reaching the Millennium Development Goals.

Daviess Menefee, Director of Library Relations for Elsevier remarked, "From the start Elsevier has been involved in developing these programs and recognizes the need to provide scientists, researchers and policymakers in the developing world with the tools necessary to advance their work. We strive to make a difference by providing the highest standards in science research to some of the poorest countries in the world."

In a World Health Organization (WHO) survey conducted in 2000, researchers and academics in developing countries ranked access to subscription based journals as one of their most pressing problems. In countries with per capita income of less than USD $1000 per annum, 56 percent of academic institutions surveyed had no current subscriptions to international journals. These three programs, which are in line with the UN Millennium Development Goals, hope to solve this problem and make research as easily accessible in countries such as Sierra Leone as it is in England and the USA.

Representatives from the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN Environmental Programme, and leading science and technology publishers, together with representatives from Cornell and Yale Universities, met today to extend their cooperation to 2015, in line with the UN’s MDGs.

About HINARI

HINARI (Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative), launched in 2002 under the leadership of the World Health Organization (WHO), with technical assistance from Yale University Library, enables developing countries to gain access to one of the world's largest collections of biomedical and health literature. Over 3750 journal titles are now available to health institutions in 107 countries, benefiting many thousands of health workers and researchers.

About AGORA

AGORA (Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture) [www.aginternetwork.org], initiated in 2003 and led by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) with support from the Mann Library, Cornell University, together with major publishers, enables developing countries to gain access to an outstanding digital library collection in the fields of food, agriculture, environmental science and related social sciences. AGORA provides a collection of 958 journals to institutions in 107 countries. AGORA is designed to enhance the scholarship of the many thousands of students, faculty and researchers in agriculture and life sciences in the developing world.

About OARE

OARE (Online Access to Research in the Environment), an international public-private consortium introduced in 2006 by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Yale University Library and School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and leading science and technology publishers, enables 70 low income countries to gain free access to over 1,300 scientific journal titles owned and published by over 300 prestigious publishing houses, scholarly societies, and scientific associations. Another 37 countries will be added by 2008. 

  FAO Case Study on semantically navigable “Food, Nutrition and Agriculture Journal” is published by W3C

One current application of the Semantic Web in the agricultural domain is the AGRIS Application Profile (or AGRIS Application Ontology) consisting of concepts describing document-like information objects such as title, creator and publisher. Used in conjunction with AGROVOC (the multilingual agricultural thesaurus), it creates an information retrieval application that performs query expansion by exploiting the relationships between concepts.


One major advantage of an ontology-based system over a traditional one lies in its ability to perform concept-based searches. The FNA (Food Nutrition and Agriculture) portal is a successful example of how the use of ontologies can improve search results. Metadata about each article in the FNA Journal (available in FAO’s Corporate Document Repository and the FAO’s bibliographical database) were combined and converted to a single RDFS format. The result is a portal that allows for concept-based as well as multilingual searches.


Further studies are being carried out to further exploit semantic relationships and develop user friendly services.


Read the complete case study:
www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/UseCases/FAO


Read a related paper on FNA Ontology: ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/009/ah765e/ah765e00.pdf


Read a related paper on Application Ontology: ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/009/ag869e/ag869e00.pdf

  [Request for comments] Proposed Architecture and Workflow for Managing Decentralized Information on Organizations Using a Central Registry File

During the last Content Management Task Force meeting, Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR) and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) proposed the idea of a distributed architecture where the single organizations describe themselves and host the description on a web server and the URLs of the files containing the descriptions would be registered in a Registry File. This would allow for the creation of powerful web services based on the harvesting of the description files, eliminating the heavy job of maintaining large databases, which are difficult to update and often contain information that is already covered by other databases. This reduces the risk of duplication of work and brings economy of scale. The creation of web services would be possible thanks to the adoption of a common standard to be used in the descriptions: the Organizations Application Profile proposed by FAO and GFAR (still in draft state and available for comments here: www.fao.org/agris/agmes/dtd/org.dtd.txt).

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