2010 04 iaald-agrovoc_keizer-et-al

Montpellier 25-29 April 2010

The AGROVOC Concept
Server Workbench System:
Empowering management of
agricultural vocabularies with
semantics
IAALD World Congress

Margherita SINI1, Sachit RAJBHANDARI1, Maziar AMIRHOSSEINI2,
Gudrun JOHANNSEN1,Ahsan MORSHED1, Johannes KEIZER1,
1FAOof the UN, Italy; 2The faculty of Information Science and Technology,
Universiti Kebangsaan, Malaysia

dr johannes keizer - FAO of the United Nations - knowledge and capacity for development


Do we need
AGROVOC?

Yes!
And Why:


The Linked Data Universe:
http://www.linkeddata.com

3


RDF as a common format for merging data

•http://www.w3.org/2007/Talks/0221-Bangalore-IH/


Finding things related to “genes” across
databases

Source: Joanne Luciano, Mitre, and the W3C HCLS IG



AgroTagger
• Name/Identy determination in unstructured
texts
• Using Agrovoc as a controlled vocabulary
• Structured RDF files that can be used to link
data

• Developed by IIT Kanpur for AgroPedia
Indica
• Prototype under testing with excellent
results



http://agropedia.iitk.ac.in/auto_tagger/callable_auto_tagger.php



AGROVOC: From a
traditional thesaurus to an
Agricultural Concept
Scheme

A long and
Winding
Road

..from thesaurus to Ontologies….



AGROVOC since 2004

• We wanted to make a semantic web tool
from AGROVOC
• There was no standard model outside, we
were on our own
We discussed three years the model to

•

which we wanted to convert AGROVOC

……but in the meantime AGROVOC was
used and translated into 20 languages



Semantic Relationships

Concept to isA (hierarchy), isPestOf, hasPest
Concept

Concept to has_lexicalization
Term (links concepts to their lexical

realizations)

Term to isSynonymOf, isTranslationOf,
Term hasAcronym, hasAbbreviation

Term to hasSpellingVariant, hasSingular
String



The AGROVOC OWL model



More semantics
MAIZE MAIZE
UF corn synonym corn
NT flint maize superclass-of flint maize
NT popcorn used-to-make popcorn
NT sweet corn hybridized-into sweet corn
MILK MILK
NT Milk Fat ingredient Milk Fat

NT Colostrum ingredient Colostrum
NT Cow Milk superclass-of Cow Milk

International Fund for International Fund for
Agricultural Agricultural
Development Development
UF IFAD acronym IFAD



AGROVOC today
 around 30,000 concepts

 600000 labels in around 20 languages.

 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

 Concepts may be organized in multiple categories.



Evaluation of the Process
 The AGROVOC OWL model needs a revision
 Ontological over commitment in many class/subclass
hierarchies
 Unnecessary complications through concept /term/string
hierarchy

 Our push of AGROVOC to the Semantic Web

had enormous positive effects, among others
 From 4 to 20 language versions
 Defacto standard for indexing in many areas
 More than 2000 downloads only in 2009
 SKOS incorporated all our requirements



http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/



The AGROVOC SKOS Model

Agrovoc SKOS
rdf:type
Concept Concept
Scheme Scheme
skos:inScheme skos:topConceptOf

6211 rdf:type
skos:broader
8171 rdf:type SKOS

skos:broader rdf:type Concept
1474 rdf:type
skos:broader
12332 “corn”
skosxl:prefLabel skosxl:literalForm
rdf:type
:foo SKOS
rdf:type
skosxl:altLabel Label
:bar
skosxl:literalForm “maize”



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



Architecture of the System



Concept/Term Management


Concept Relationship
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 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


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



Visualization of concepts and
Relationships in the Workbench



AGROVOC Web Services



The road map
• The AGROVOC concept scheme in it’s
proprietary OWL model will be published on
June 5, 2010 on version 1.0 of the concept
server workbench
• Within Summer 2010 a patch to version 1.0 of

the workbench will make it possible to export
AGROVOC SKOS
• AGROVOC SKOS will be published as linked
data.
• With version 2.0 of the workbench SKOS will
become the native format for AGROVOC


…and more



Thank You!


2010 04 iaald-agrovoc_keizer-et-al

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