Agricultural Data Interest Group (IGAD) Pre-Meeting Agenda Research Data Alliance 21st to 22nd September 2015 INRA, Paris (France)

1. From GACS to Agrisemantics –
steps forward towards
interoperability of data for
agriculture and nutrition
Caterina Caracciolo
FAO

2. GACS?
= Global Agriculture Concept Scheme
• To make a common repository of terminological
and conceptual information in agriculture
– Many similar initiatives in the area, with both some
overlaps and differences, but no coordination
• To achieve efficiency of scale by maintaining core
concepts in cooperation

3. GACS vocabularies – The Thesauri involved

4. Overlap between
AGROVOC, NALT, CABT - Estimated

5. AGROVOC, NALT, CABI – similarity in
use
All are used within applications of similar nature
– here our application of choice, used in GACS

6. GACS WG basics - Who
• Representatives from each organization
• 2 independent consultants
• Involved also CGIAR

7. GACS output so far (Apr ‘14- Jul ‘15)
• GACS beta online:
• http://tester-os-kktest.lib.helsinki.fi/gacsdemo/en/
• A core of 15,000 concepts, ~400k terms
– Organisms
– Places
– Chemicals
– “General” concepts
• Information available results from a “merge” of the
three
• All RDF-SKOS

8. GACS Beta

9. Ongoing
• Finalizing the resolution of “lumps”
– The mapping of A ->B and then B –> C resulted in
potentially problematic groups of concepts
• “Clean up” labels, e.g. to harmonize use of
sing/plur
• Move in a fully functional editing environment

10. Ongoing cont’d
• Decide on needed concept types, e.g., for
organisms, chemicals, ..
• How to deal with non-identical hierarchies
when merging mapped concepts
• Define general policy for dealing with
scientific and common names of organisms
(are different things? Or different names for
the same things?)

11. GACS approach to data interoperability
• Goal: access and aggregate data of diverse
source, and be able to combine it and use in
information systems different than those of origin
• Given a set of concept schemes, establish
correspondences so that data described with
them may be meaningfully reused in different
applications

12. After GACS - Agrisemantics
• Goal – a BMGF project
• Project proposal is in early stage of development
• Discussion started during a workshop in Rome,
see:
• Goal: Expand GACS in terms of:
– Coverage, by hooking in other similar vocabularies
– Typology of resources involved. Goal: Formalize and
use the intuitive connections between the concepts
contained in thesauri and concepts used to describe
other type of resources – e.g., reference data for time
series, ontologies used for data annotation etc.

13. Some pointers
• To follow progress, check out
http://aims.fao.org and subscribe to the
user communit
• Agrisemantics Workshop July 2015 –- page
contains links to background material:
http://aims.fao.org/agrisemantics-
workshop-2015