Presentation held by John Fereira, Valeria Pesce, Jon Corson-Rikert, Ajit Maru at the Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS) Workshop 2012 in Kutching, Sarawak, Malaysia from September 3 - 4, 2012

1. AgriVIVO
An Ontology‐based Store of URIs and
Relations between Entities in Agricultural
Research
John Fereira, Valeria Pesce,
Jon Corson-Rikert, Ajit Maru
Cornell University
Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR)
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

2. A need for better networking
• Fostering collaboration and synergy through
greater awareness
• Identifying missing expertise
• Facilitating team formation
• Reducing duplication of research

3. Who are we talking about?
• Agricultural researchers
• Agricultural practitioners
• Agricultural information managers

4. People already part of a community
• FAO • IAALD
• GFAR • Forago
• IICA • CIRAD
• E-Agriculture • CGIAR
• CIARD • CTA
• AIMS • GFAR
• FARA • And many more

5. Networking needs
How easy is it today for someone to identify /
discover...
• potential best collaborators all over the world for a
project
• a person with an answer to his/her question
• an organization running a project on a specific
area of research
• publications written by a potential collaborator
• numbers or geographic distribution of available
competencies or ongoing projects

6. How it’s done now
Personal connections Conferences Knowledge networks
Institutional
HR database
and online
directories

7. How to do it more efficiently
1. Go beyond serendipity
• Gather information systematically
• Focus on sources providing data by discipline,
organization, or topic
• Leverage existing, meaningful relationships

8. How to do it more efficiently
2. Go beyond isolated communities
• Search several directories / communities
• Share people profiles, affiliations, expertice across
communities
Now Better networking
IAALD community FAO Knowledge Café
GFAR National
databases database of
YPARD experts
AIMS
community
CG Map
e-agriculture community

9. What is VIVO
VIVO is semantic publishing platform for
making data about research activities
visible and accessible.

10. History of VIVO
• 2003 – VIVO Cornell
“Research & Expertise Across Cornell”
• 2009 – VIVO Network
“Enabling national networking of scientists”
$12.2 million, two-year grant from NIH
• 2010 – VIVO at USDA
First federal organization to commit to using
VIVO. Five USDA agencies to participate
initially.

11. Example VIVO profile

12. Example VIVO topic

13. VIVO Components
• Jena SDB triple store
• Core ontology
• Bundled ontologies
• Ontology editor
• Data ingest tools
• Apache Solr search engine
• Linked Data publishing
• CMS features

14. VIVO Ontology Classes
• Person (FOAF + VIVO)
• Information Resource (VIVO + BIBO)
• Organization (FOAF + VIVO)
• Area (FAO Geopolitical)
• Event (Event)

15. VIVO data flow
PubMed
HR database OSP grants
publications
Harvested data mapped
to RDF
VIVO
HTML RDF

16. What is AgriVIVO
• AgriVIVO will not replace any existing community or database, it will work as
a common registry to interlink the data managed in the existing
communities.
• Communities and databases will indirectly share data through AgriVIVO
IAALD community FAO Knowledge Café
GFAR National
databases database of Person1 > Affiliation > Institution3
experts Institution3 > Participates in > Project2
YPARD Project2 > Is about > Topic1
AIMS
community Person2 > Participates in > Project2
Person2 > Expertise > Topic1
Person1 > Knows > Person2
CG Map
Person1 > Author of > Publication1
Person1 > Author of > Publication2
e-agriculture community [...]

17. AgriVIVO data flow
AIMS e-Agriculture IAALD …
Custom harvesters
Map Data to RDF
AgriVIVO
HTML API RDF

18. AgriVIVO: a data hub
• Jena SDB triple store
• Core ontology
• Bundled ontologies + AgRES, AGROVOC
• Ontology editor
• Data ingest tools + custom harvest tools
• Apache Solr search engine
• Linked Data publishing
• CMS features
• Additional data APIs (Linked Data API)

19. AgriVIVO-driven applications
Make data highly available to support
applications built using any platform
Linked Data API can export data as
XML, JSON, RDF, etc

20. AgriVIVO-driven applications
Global search engine

21. AgriVIVO-driven applications
Visualization

22. AgriVIVO-driven applications
Contextual applications

23. Thank you!
John Fereira: jaf30@cornell.edu
Valeria Pesce: valeria.pesce@fao.org
VIVO: http://vivoweb.org