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

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

2. The Mandate of FAO • Main goal of FAO is to reduce the quantity of hungry people by 50% within the year 2015. • WAICENT (World Agricultural Information Center) is FAO’s approach to fight hunger with information • FAO itself produces huge amount of content in it’s subject area • It is also within FAOs mandate to make available useful information from other information providers • FAO collaborates in information networks

3. Overview • The Background of the project • Ontologies • The Agricultural Ontology Service • Operational Plan

4. Background 1: Existing thesauri • FAO maintains since the early 80ths the multilingual thesaurus Agrovoc • Other consistent thesauri are maintained by CABI 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 leading language • None of the systems is satisfactory for resource description and discovery purposes

5. Background 3: thesauri contain knowledge • Thesauri were mostly used only as indexing and searching helps • 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 4: the origin of the project • born as 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 • Taxonomies are important building blocks for Ontologies • but it has still to be defined what the detailed structure and function of the Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS) will be

7. Ontologies - Definitions • 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 2 An ontology may take a variety of forms, -but it always includes a vocabulary of concepts and specification of their meanings.

9. Ontologies - Why we need them • To facilitate communications among people and organisations • aid to human communication and shared understanding by specifying meaning • To facilitate communications among systems. i,e to achieve inter-operability • To enable sharing and reuse of domain knowledge • To make domain assumptions explicit • To separate domain knowledge from the operational knowledge • To analyse domain knowledge

10. Ontologies - The Use • For Information Resource Description • To annotate web pages or documents with meaning • To give context based organisation (semantic clustering) of information resources • For Information Resource Discovery • As a knowledge management tools 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. Ontologies - And Dublin Core? • Domain Ontologies will integrate meta data schemas. This will allow machines to process information and to extract knowledge • The definition of the DC Schema correspondends quite well to the definition of an ontology • Metadata must be rich and of high quality to improve information retrieval. Ontologies can help to produce them • The AOS will deliver tools to define the subject element of the DC element set

12. 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

13. Definitions Labels Relations ?????? Responsibles Attributes Concept URI, e.g., www.agri-ontology.org/2050.xml AOS: Structure Proposals

14. Type of Relation Used in Domain ?????? Properties Attribute Relation AOS: Structure Proposals

15. Language Spell Used in Domain Properties Attribute Label AOS: Structure Proposals

16. 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

17. 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……..

18. AOS: Possible Use…….. 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

19. 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 • Champions of the discussion: • FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) • CABI • University of Florida (Agricultural Department) • National Agriculture Research Center (Japan) • Participants from the OntoWeb Initiative • 14th/15th November a workshop will discuss the concept note and recommend a possible project • If agreed by the participating organizations the project could start in early 2002

20. Discussion points • 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. Report from the workshop • It is a very challenging project to get various partners together for a common reference system for knowledge organization • There is a need to get applications, tools and vocabularies to deliver high quality input for the subject element of DC • Knowledge Organization Systems (Ontologies) are a key issue to improve machine search engines • The existing different initiatives must get into contact

22. Further Information: Http://www.fao.org/agris http://www.fao.org/agrovoc Johannes.Keizer@fao.org