The AGROVOC Concept Server Workbench

1. The AGROVOC Concept Server Workbench AOS partners: FAO, KU, ICRISAT, Maryland University October 2009

2. Outline • Background • From a traditional thesaurus to the Agricultural Ontology Service Concept Server • AGROVOC Concept Server Workbench • Technical information • What’s Next

3. Background

4. AOS • Multi-partner initiative, 2001 • Facilitate the provision of services in the agricultural domain with the use of semantic technologies • Resources and standards • KOS and mappings, Metadata Elements and Schemes • Registries and Ontology Server • Tools and Publication, …… • Sharing, Interoperability

5. AGROVOC is a multilingual structured thesaurus Covers all the subject fields in agriculture, forestry, fisheries, food and related domains (e.g. environment) Consists of words or expressions (terms), in different languages and organized in relationships Relations (e.g. “broader”, “narrower”, and “related”) are used to identify and connect terms What is AGROVOC?

6. The AGROVOC Thesaurus was developed by the FAO and the Commission of the European Communities in the early 1980s Maintained and updated online by FAO roughly every three months http://www.fao.org/agrovoc Who developed AGROVOC?

7. AGROVOC is used all over the world, mostly for indexing and retrieving data in agricultural information systems Statistical value show an average hits of 5,400 on any weekday to AGROVOC Thesaurus About 90 countries regularly access AGROVOC online Who uses AGROVOC?

8. AGROVOC is used world-wide, so it is imperative to translate the thesaurus into as many languages as possible This helps the users to index or search information sources in their own language It is available in 6 official languages of FAO - English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Russian Also available in other languages - Portuguese, Czech, Japanese, Thai, Slovak, German, Hungarian, Polish, Persian, Italian, Malay, Telegu, Hindi, Turkish, and Lao Why is AGROVOC multilingual?

9. AGROVOC is made up of terms, which consist of one or more words representing always one and the same concept For each term, a word block is displayed, showing the hierarchical and non-hierarchical relation to other terms: BT, NT ,RT, USE/UF Scope notes are used in AGROVOC to clarify the meaning and the context of terms How is AGROVOC structured?

10. A thesaurus has equivalence (USE/UF), broader term (BT), narrower term (NT), and related term (RT) relationships There is a need of an extended set of relationships to perform more granular and more consistent indexing With this extension, more effective searching and browsing for users is possible More meaning to AGROVOC relations

11. The term "pollution" can have association with other terms Ex: "pollutants" is formally associated with the term "pollution" using the Related Term (RT) relationship In practice, we may be able to indicate explicitly that "pollutants" cause "pollution“ => Relationship becomes more meaningful than simply portraying them as Related Terms (RT) Example

12. What more semantics means • MAIZE • UF corn • NT flint maize NT popcorn NT sweet corn • MILK • NT Milk Fat • NT Colostrum • NT Cow Milk • International Fund for Agricultural Development • UF IFAD • MAIZE • synonym corn • superclass-of flint maize used-to-make popcorn hybridized-into sweet corn • MILK • ingredient Milk Fat • ingredient Colostrum • superclass-of Cow Milk • International Fund for Agricultural • Development • acronym IFAD

13. From a traditional thesaurus to the Agricultural Ontology Service Concept Server

14. to facilitate its use for developing agricultural domain knowledge organization systems, including ontologies, without requiring the terminologist to start from scratch to enable the development of applications using semantic technologies to enable interoperability between applications using these ontologies to better support information management for the web environment Expressing AGROVOC in OWL

15. AGROVOC Concept Server • It is a one-stop shop for terminological knowledge related to agriculture in general • A knowledge base of related concepts organized in ontological relationships (hierarchical, associative, equivalence) • Is a concept/term/string based system • Contains 600000 terms in around 20 languages. • Concepts may be also organized in multiple categories.

16. Concepts (the abstract meaning) Ex: ‘rice’ in the sense of a plant, Terms (language-specific lexical forms) Ex: ‘Rice’, ‘Riz’, ‘Arroz’, ‘稻米’, or ‘Paddy’ Term variants (the range of forms that can occur for each term) Ex: ‘O. sativa’ or ‘Oryza Sativa’, ‘Organization’ or Organisation’ Three levels of representation

17. Concept example Organization • hasLexicalization • Organizações(pt) • Organization (en) [P. T] hasSpellingVariant • Organisation (uk-en) • hasSubClass department (en) • hasStatus • Published • hasDateCreated • 12/12/2006 • hasDateUpdated • 01/10/2009

18. Semantic Relationships

19. AGROVOC Concept Server Workbench

20. The Workbench • Is a web-based working environment for managing the AGROVOC Concept Server • Facilitate the collaborative editing of multilingual terminology and semantic concept information • It includes administration and group management features • It includes workflows for maintenance, validation and quality assurance of the data pool • The CS is accessible freely to everybody to facilitates collaborative editing

21. Non registered users Term editors Ontology editors Validators Publishers Administrators Users/Roles/Groups

22. Non registered users can navigate or search the system can suggest terms in any language can suggest concepts and relationships Term editors (terminologist/thesaurus editor) Can suggest on concepts modifications can add/edit/delete only terms with languages assigned can edit/delete only by editors who are the creators of the term Ontology editors (terminologist/thesaurus editor ) can manage terms (of specific languages) and concepts Can delete concepts only with the terms with languages assigned Can edit/delete only by the editors who are the creator of the concept Users/Roles/Groups cont.

23. Validators can check and validate the work done by the editors (terms and ontology editors) based on assigned languages Publishers (ontology editors) Have permission on terms and concepts Can validate editors and confirm validators work access to all languages Administrators all previous plus manage users, groups, provide statistics, etc access to all languages Users/Roles/Groups cont.

24. Proposed by guest Proposed Revised by guest Revised Validated Published Proposed deprecated Deprecated Concepts/Terms Status

25. Proposed by guest status is set to new concepts/terms created by non-registered users Proposed status is set to new concepts/terms created by registered users Revised guest status is set to changes made by non-registered users Revised status is set to changes made by registered users Concepts/Terms Status cont.

26. Validated status is set once validator confirms the concepts/terms Published status is set to published after the approval of publisher Proposed deprecated status is set if the concepts/terms are deleted Deprecated status is set once the validators /publishers confirms the deleted concepts/terms Concepts/Terms Status cont.

27. RegistrationPage

28. Login Page

29. Home Search Concept/Term Management Relationship Management Classification Scheme Management Validation Consistency Check Import/Export User/Group Management Statistics/Preferences Modules

30. Link to different modules Sign out link to logout from the system. Post Comment link to send the comments about that specific module Help link to view the help for specific module Display Language link to choose the languages for data to be displayed Menubar

31. Select the languages to be shown for concepts DisplayLanguage

32. Allows provision of feedbacks for each module Comments

33. Steps by steps procedure for each module Help

34. Home Page

35. Shows the list of recent changes in reverse chronological order Redirect to the respective module clicking on the list item Ex. Click on the concept to go the concept module Provides basic information about the workbench Home Page

36. by string: the user can specify if the system should search by exact match, beginning with, contains or fuzzy by URI or termcode; or by range of term code (e.g. between 123 and 9876) by sub-vocabulary by classification schemes by creation or modification date by specific relationships (e.g. search all concepts using the “has_pest”) by status by language Search

37. Search

38. Exact match (“water” will find only water) Starting with (“water” will find “water”, “water management”, and “watergate”) Contain (“water” will find “water”, “water management”, “inland water”, and “watergate”) Exact word (“water” will find “water”, “water management”, “inland water” but not “watergate”)  Case Sensitive (“ABc” will find only for the word “ABc” and not “abc” Include Description Search also content of definitions, images, editorial notes, scope notes Include Spelling Variant Search also on different spelling variants Search Criteria

39. Visualize / Navigate Concepts depending on the access level, user can edit Show selected concept details all terms and other information Show selected concept relationships Delete concept Can view the URI of the concept enabling ‘Show URI’ option Concept Management

40. Concept/Term Management

41. Add/Delete Concept • Add term to the newly created concept in one language • Can delete the concept and all the relationship associated with that concept

42. Can create the concept-concept relationship Inverse relationship is also created automatically Ex: If we create A affect B, then B is affected by A relationship is also created Concept Relationship

43. Concept Image • Name of the image with description • URL will point to the image which will open in an external • Provide the source of the image • Can add more translation in different language

44. Scope Notes / Editorial Notes • In Editorial Notes, we can post the modifications made to the selected concepts • In Scope Notes, we can post information for indexing • Both can contain multiple values in multiple languages

45. Concept Definition • Add definition to the selected concept • Add translation in different languages • Provide the source of the definition • Creation and modified date are set automatically

46. Graph Visualization

47. Visualize / Navigate Terms depending on the user access level and role Show selected term details Show selected term relationships Show term variances Add/Edit/Delete term Term Management

48. Add/Edit/Delete Term • Term actions will be associated to the selected concept • Term can be created in different languages • Term can be set as preferred or non preferred • An option allows preferred terms visualization only in the concept tree browser

49. Term History Information • Shows term creation and updated date • Shows status of the term • Shows the history of actions on this term

50. Term Relationship • Add/edit/delete term-term relationship • Relationships can be • is scientific name of • has scientific name • has synonym • has translation • is acronym of • has acronym • has abbreviation