These slides describe the outcome of an e-government project named FOOD, FOod in Open Data, which was carried out in the context of a collaboration between the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the Italian National Research Council, the Italian Ministry of Agriculture (MIPAAF) and the Italian Digital Agency (AgID). In particular, we implemented several ontologies for describing protected names of products (wine, pasta, fish, oil, etc.). In addition, we present the process carried out for producing and publishing a LOD dataset containing data extracted from existing Italian policy documents on such products and compliant with the aforementioned ontologies. Paper: http://w3id.org/people/essepuntato/papers/food-iswc2016.html Ontologies+Data: http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3187903

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FOOD: FOod in Open Data
Silvio Peroni, Giorgia Lodi, Luigi Asprino,
Aldo Gangemi, Valentina Presutti
15th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2016)
Kobe, Japan, October 17-23, 2016
Paper: https://w3id.org/people/essepuntato/papers/food-iswc2016.html
Ontologies+Data: http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3187903

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Outline
• Quality schemes and policy documents
• The FOOD project
• FOOD ontologies
• FOOD data
• Conclusions

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Quality schemes
• European Union (EU) quality schemes for agricultural and
food products refer to agricultural products and foodstuffs,
wines, spirits and aromatised wines, which producers or
producer groups have registered according to specific rules
so as to assure consumers that these are the genuine
products, not imitations seeking to benefit from the good name
and reputation of the original
– PDO (Protected Designation of Origin)
– PGI (Protected Geographical Indication)
– TSG (Traditional Speciality Guaranteed)
• Issue: management of quality schemes is not fully automatised
at the EU level, and no standards are used in the definition of
the rules that should regulate them

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Policy documents
• Italian situation: the rules one has to follow for
applying for a quality scheme are regulated by
particular policy documents (a.k.a. product
specifications)
• What’s in there
– First article: the protected name and the types of
related products of such name
– Second article: the raw materials which contribute to
the products composition
– Third article: production area
– Rest of the articles: physical/chemical/organoleptic
characteristics of the products + historical/
geographical evidences supporting the production
area + methods used for producing the products of
that protected name
Italian label
applied to
wines
compliant to
a particular
policy
document

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FOOD project
• The FOod in Open Data (FOOD) project was conceived and carried out by the
Ministry of Agriculture (MIPAAF), the Italian Digital Agency (AgID), and the
STLab
• Main goal: to extract the data contained in the textual content (from DOCX and
PDF files) of the more than more than 800 policy documents of Italian
agricultural PDO, PGI and TSG products, and to make them available as LOD
according to appropriate ontologies to be developed within the project
• Three main concepts:
– protected name, i.e. a trademark label (e.g., “Abruzzo DOC” for a particular Italian
wine), issued by an authority granted for certifying agricultural products and
foodstuffs, that typically belongs to a certification scheme (i.e. PDO, PGI, TSG);
– type, i.e., a possible type for certain products (e.g., “white” or “red” for wines);
– product, i.e., the agricultural product or foodstuff (e.g., “Abruzzo DOC red wine”)
which has a type, refers to a protected name disciplined by a certain policy
document, and is described in terms of its raw materials (the particular wine varietal
used) and physical/chemical/organolectic characteristics (colour, smell, flavour, etc.)
https://w3id.org/food

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Ontologies
• We needed several ontologies for describing data related
to each of the products introduced in the policy documents
• The ontology development process has been split in three
sequential steps
1.eXtreme Design (XD) methodology for developing an upper
ontology describing the concepts protected name, type, product
and the related contextual information (characteristics, raw
material, etc.)
2.Template-based approach based on the upper ontology for
developing other 20 ontologies (one for each kind of the
products we had to handle)
3.Alignment to other existing and relevant ontologies (i.e.
AGROVOC, DOLCE, DBpedia and Wordnet)

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Upper Ontology
• Two ontology engineers
analysed all the Italian
policy documents about
agricultural products
• Domain experts of
MIPAAF and AgID have
been involved as well so
as to identify the main
high-level concepts
characterising the
domain
• EU schemes for
protected names were
also considered so as to
take into account how
they are organised at
the European level

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Other ontologies
For speeding up
the process, we
involved three
more ontology
engineers, and we
provided a generic
Graffoo template
created starting
from the parts of
the upper ontology
that had to be
extended, so as to
guide the
development of all
the other
ontologies in an
homogeneous way

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Data extraction
563 policy
documents on wines
274 policy documents
on other products
INPUT OUTPUT
EXTRACTION VALIDATION CONVERSION
Scripts
convert
CSV
documents
into RDF
documents
People from our
lab gather data by
reading
documents
Scripts extract
relevant data from
source documents
Scripts
convert
validated
data into
CSV
documents
Experts (MIPAAF
+ AgID)
correct and
validate data
+
Extracting DBpedia entities referring to production places,
revised by humans, and aligned existing Italian PA LOD

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Data: example
product:wine-abruzzo-red
a upper:Product , wine:Wine ;
rdfs:label
"Wine 'Abruzzo' of type 'Rosso'"@en ,
"Vino 'Abruzzo' Rosso"@it ;
upper:hasProtectedName
name:wine-abruzzo ;
upper:hasDescription
descraw:wine-abruzzo-red-raw-material-1 ,
descraw:wine-abruzzo-red-raw-material-2 ;
upper:hasType type:red-wine .
descraw:wine-abruzzo-red-raw-material-1
a upper:DescriptionOfRawMaterial ;
rdfs:label "Vitigno 'Montepulciano': minimo (>=) 80%" ;
upper:hasRawMaterial rawmat:vine-variety-montepulciano ;
upper:hasMinimumValue "80%" .
A Turtle excerpt of the data about
the wine “Abruzzo Rosso”…
… and its
rendering in HTML
by means of
LOD View

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Conclusions
• We have described the outcomes of an e-government project named FOOD
– FOod in Open Data – carried out in the context of a collaboration between
STLab, MIPAAF and AgID
– Input: 837 policy documents
– Outcome: 21 ontologies for describing protected names and their products + LOD
– Reuse: Upper Ontology for the Umbrian portal on PDO/PGI/TSG products
• Lessons learnt
– The automatic extraction of data from the policy documents – even when they are
generally structured similarly – it is quite difficult and the results are far from the
quality required for being published – the experts intervention was quite huge
– A manual extraction of such data would have prevented the introduction of such a
large number of mistakes
– The analysis done have enabled the refactor of existing templates for policy
documents so as to write relevant information in an homogeneous manner – a
crucial point for guaranteeing automatic processing in the future

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Thanks for your attention
Silvio Peroni, Giorgia Lodi, Luigi Asprino,
Aldo Gangemi, Valentina Presutti
15th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2016)
Kobe, Japan, October 17-23, 2016
Paper: https://w3id.org/people/essepuntato/papers/food-iswc2016.html
Ontologies+Data: http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3187903