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Johannes Keizer, Frehiwot Fisseha, Kat Hagedorn and Stephen Katz,

The Agricultural Ontology Service: A Proposal to Create a Knowledge Organisation Framework in the Area of Food and Agriculture. Johannes Keizer, Frehiwot Fisseha, Kat Hagedorn and Stephen Katz, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Library and Documentation Systems Division.

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Johannes Keizer, Frehiwot Fisseha, Kat Hagedorn and Stephen Katz,

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  1. The Agricultural Ontology Service:A Proposal to Create a Knowledge Organisation Framework in the Area of Food and Agriculture Johannes Keizer, Frehiwot Fisseha, Kat Hagedorn and Stephen Katz, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Library and Documentation Systems Division

  2. The Mandate of FAO • Goal of FAO is to reduce hunger in the world and to improve living conditions • WAICENT (World Agricultural Information Center) is FAO’s approach to fight hunger with information • FAO itself produces huge amount of content in its subject area • It is also within FAO’s mandate to make available useful information from other information providers • FAO collaborates in information networks

  3. Overview • The Background of the project • Ontologies, what this means for us • Some points on the AOS project • Possible next steps

  4. Background 1: Existing thesauri • FAO maintains the multilingual thesaurus AGROVOC since the early 80s • Other consistent thesauri are maintained by CABI in England and the National Agricultural Library in the States • Various other knowledge organization systems are scattered around the world • The existing systems are language biased with English as the leading language • None of the systems is satisfactory for resource description and discovery purposes

  5. Background 2: Thesauri Contain Knowledge • Thesauri were mostly used only for indexing and to help users in searching • But thesauri are already knowledge organization systems • Not only the vocabulary of concepts, but also the defined relations (BT, NT, RT, UF …) contain domain knowledge • This knowledge can be leveraged using web technology

  6. Background 3: the Origin of the Project • Born as the AGROVOC Taxonomy Server • Agronomists were upset with the word taxonomy • IT people were upset about the word server • The word ontology started to become sexy • We learned that taxonomies are important building blocks for ontologies • But do we know really what an ontology is? • And the detailed structure and function of the Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS) is still to be defined

  7. Ontologies: What We’ve Heard • The term “ontology” has been used for a number of years by the artificial intelligence and knowledge representation community but is now becoming part of the standard terminology of a much wider community including information systems modelling and XML • An ontology is a vocabulary of terms and relations rich enough to enable us to express knowledge and intention without semantic ambiguity • Ontology describes domain knowledge in a generic way and provides an agreed-upon understanding of a domain • Ontology is THE key technology in semantic information processing

  8. Ontologies - Definitions An ontology may take a variety of forms, - but it always includes a vocabulary of concepts and specification of their meanings - and to produce this, we are in a strong position as one of the biggest content providers in the area of agricultural information

  9. Ontologies - What we expect them to do • Facilitate communication among people and organizations • Aid human communication and shared understanding by specifying meaning • Facilitate communications among systems, i.e., to achieve inter-operability • Enable sharing and re-use of domain knowledge • Make domain assumptions explicit • Help to analyse domain knowledge

  10. Ontologies - the Practical Puposes • For information resource description • To annotate web pages or documents with meaning • To provide context based organisation (semantic clustering) of information resources • For information resource discovery • As a knowledge management tool for selective semantic access (meaning-oriented access) • As a tool for intelligent search instead of keyword matching (information retrieval) to query answering (information extraction)

  11. Dedicated KOS Existing Thesauri and Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) e.g., ASFA thesaurus e.g., the Multilingual Forestry Thesaurus (owner: GFIS) e.g., the Sustainable Development website classification (owner: SD dept.) e.g., biological taxonomies such as NCBI and ITIS Other thematic thesauri Non dedicated KOS CABI Thesaurus AGROVOC AgNIC/NAL Gemet AOS: Registry

  12. Definitions Labels Relations ?????? AOS: Structure Proposals (1) Attributes Concept URI, e.g., www.agri-ontology.org/2050.xml Responsible Party

  13. Type of Relation Used in Domain ?????? Properties Attribute Relation AOS: Structure Proposals (2)

  14. Language Spell Used in Domain Properties Attribute Label AOS: Structure Proposals (3)

  15. KOS partner Components: terms, definitions, relationships KOS uses components to build an application Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS) KOS application Federated storage and description facility KOS partner Components: terms, definitions, relationships Users search and browse application using components User feedback Discussions and choices for amendments to components AOS: Iterative Knowledge Registration

  16. Records found: 5 1. xxxxxxxxxxx 2. xxxxxxxxxxx 3. xxxxxxxxxxx 4. xxxxxxxxxxx 5. xxxxxxxxxxx What would you like to view? Forest rights issues Parasites of forests Pesticides used in forests Types of forest products Uses of forest products Biotopes Cropping systems using forests Economics of forest production Forestry equipment Soil science You may also be interested in... x You can further limit by: Geographic area Africa Web page Type of resource AOS: Possible Use……..(1)

  17. AOS: Possible Use……..(2) Agricultural Web Page Use your right mouse button to learn more about an italicized word on the page. Biosecurity: management of all biological and environmental risks associated with food and agriculture, including forestry and fisheries See also: Biosafety Food Safety Risk Management Or are you interested in...: Food Security Biological Diversity Conservation agriculture Farmers like it because it gives them a means of conserving, improving and making more efficient use of their natural resources About camels and llamas Descendants of the same rabbit-sized mammal, they have become two of humanity's most versatile domestic animals Agribusiness and small farmers Well managed contract farming contributes to both increased income for producers and higher profits for investors Toward biosecurity Biological and environmental risks associated with food and agriculture have intensified with economic globalization Urban food marketing In the “century of cities”, a major challenge will be providing adequate quantities of nutritional and affordable food for urban inhabitants Crop science and ethics In order to continue their contribution to human development, crop scientists must regain credibility

  18. AOS: The next steps • The concept note has found interest in the domain area -- comments are mostly encouraging from both subject specialists and ontology developers • Participation in this workshop: • FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) • CABI (CAB International) • Various FAO groups (Fishery, Forestry, Nutrition) • University of Florida (Agricultural Department) • National Agriculture Research Center (Japan) • Participants from the OntoWeb Initiative • And many others...

  19. The Workshop and our Expectations Discuss the goals and the feasibility of the project Shape the structure and the functionality of an Agricultural Ontology Service Define the possible collaborations and the necessary management and maintenance structures Set up a team of organizations and interested experts to write a definite project proposal

  20. Discussion points (1) • What kind of need do you see for a meta-ontology paralleling what the UMLS has done? For what would you use such a system? • Is it conceivable to run this project as a series of pilot projects with subject domains (e.g., forestry, fisheries, sustainable development, crop wild relatives) – in the end building the complete AOS? • What issues do you see regarding the building of ontological associations? • Who should participate in the project as full partners and who as peripheral partners? What are their respective responsibilities? • Who are the primary and secondary user types for the AOS? • What toolkit will be needed to create and maintain the AOS? What are the components of this toolkit? • What encoding standards should be used (e.g., RDF, DAML+OIL)?

  21. Discussion Points (2) • How does Ontologybuilding influence our concepts about data and metadata? It seems that it depends only from the viewpoint to define concepts as data or metadata

  22. Information and contacts: Http://www.fao.org/agris http://www.fao.org/agrovoc Johannes.Keizer@fao.org Frehiwot.Fisseha@fao.org Kat.Hagedorn@fao.org

  23. AOS Workshop Thursday, 15 Some of the breakout groups asked for more time to prepare their presentations. Begin of plenary at 9.20

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