Interoperability in Agricultural Information Systems: The necessity for International collaboration

3rd Symposium on Rural Knowledge Ontology - CAASS CAB

Interoperability in Agricultural Information Systems:
The necessity for International collaboration
Abstract: In a networked world with distributed repositories of knowledge
interoperability becomes a key issue. Otherwise the distributed repositories will not
become nodes of a global network, but will stay isolated silos. Interoperability is
often understood only in terms of technological interoperability, protocols for data
transfer, webservices and similar. Whereas the internet has created quite a network
of interoperable technology based on the IP and HTTP, there is a enormous lack of
semantic interoperability. Semantic Interoperability stands not only for the mediation
of meaning between different repositories but stand also for the Interoperability
between cultures and languages. FAO through Agrovoc and the Agricultural
Ontology Service is working for 8 years to create a service that gives such
interoperability standards to the community. For some years the CIARD initiative
(Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research for Development) is aiming to
create a community of practice that promotes common standards, tools and
methodologies. The aim is to make a leap forward in the global availability of
agricultural information.

2009-10-21 Dr. Johannes Keizer, FAO of the United Nations 1


Outline

FAO' mission

Development of the Web

Registries for Semantic Standards

The Agrovoc Concept Server

CIARD – a community of practice for global
accessibility of Agricultural Research and
Technology Knowledge



http://www.fao.org



Number and percentage of
undernourished persons

2004-2006: 873 million
(13%)

2000-2002: 857 million (14%)

1995-1997 :825million (14%)

1990-1992 :845million (16%)

1979-1981 853million (19%)



Access to global
knowledge and
international collaboration
is one of the key factors to
combat hunger and
poverty



The
Development of
the Web


Credits: Hynchliffe


Availability is not enough
Complex information needs for agricultural
development through research and innovation cannot
be met by simply making information available.
Disconnected repositories

Best Country Country Crop
TECA ICARDA CARIS WISARD AiDA OPACs
practices profiles NARS database AGRIS
HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML
HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML

We need to know if a certain technology has been used in a specific country and in a dryland
area for a specific crop and if there are related projects completed or ongoing, who id funding
them and where we can find the project outputs

Users



Credits: various sources


Credits: Tim Berners Lee


http://www.linkeddata.com



The Linked Data Principles

1. Use URIs as names for things
2. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those
names
3. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful RDF
information
4. Include RDF statements that link to other URIs so
that they can discover related things



The Need for
Vocabulary
Registries



Moving Vocabularies to the Network Level

Requirements:

• Expressive data structures
• Vocabularies encoded for the Web
• Access mechanisms for search and retrieval
• URI accessible content
• Use of open protocols and standards

Dr. Johannes Keizer, FAO of the United Nations


Encoding Mechanisms

XML (Extensible Markup Language)
− A data-interchange format for custom markup
languages.
RDF (Resource Description Framework)
− A data-interchange format for the representation
of graph models.
JSON (Javascript Object Notation)
− A data-interchange format based on a subset of
the JavaScript Programming Language defined
by the ECMA-262 3rd Edition standard.


3rd Symposium on Rural Knowledge Ontology -
Content CAASS CAB

Vocabularies Registry

Web Services
Agrovoc
Query Expansion

Geopolitical
Ontology

AgMes Searching Heterogeneous
Collections
Schemes

Domain

Ontologies
Metadata Creation

Credits: Diane V. Goetz


Agricultural Ontology Service


Multi-partner initiative, 2001

Facilitate the provision of services in the
agricultural domain with the use of semantic
technologies

Resources and standards
−
KOS and mappings, Metadata Elements and
Schemes
−
Registries and Ontology Server
−
Tools and Publication, ……

Sharing, Interoperability


What is AGROVOC?

AGROVOC is a multilingual structured
thesaurus

Covers all the subject fields in agriculture,
forestry, fisheries, food and related domains
(e.g. environment)

Consists of words or expressions (terms), in
different languages and organized in
relationships

Relations (e.g. “broader”, “narrower”, and
“related”) are used to identify and connect
terms


Who uses AGROVOC?


AGROVOC is used all over the world, mostly
for indexing and retrieving data in agricultural
information systems

Statistical value show an average hits of 5,400
on any weekday to AGROVOC Thesaurus

About 90 countries regularly access
AGROVOC online


Why is AGROVOC multilingual?

AGROVOC is used world-wide, so it is imperative
to translate the thesaurus into as many languages
as possible

This helps the users to index or search
information sources in their own language

It is available in 6 official languages of FAO -
English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and
Russian

Also available in other languages - Portuguese,
Czech, Japanese, Thai, Slovak, German,
Hungarian, Polish, Persian, Italian, Malay, Telegu,
Hindi, Turkish, and Lao


How is AGROVOC structured?


AGROVOC is made up of terms, which consist
of one or more words representing always one
and the same concept

For each term, a word block is displayed,
showing the hierarchical and non-hierarchical
relation to other terms: BT, NT ,RT, USE/UF

Scope notes are used in AGROVOC to clarify
the meaning and the context of terms


More meaning to AGROVOC relations

A thesaurus has equivalence (USE/UF),
broader term (BT), narrower term (NT), and
related term (RT) relationships

There is a need of an extended set of
relationships to perform more granular and
more consistent indexing

With this extension, more effective searching
and browsing for users is possible


Example


The term "pollution" can have association with
other terms
−
Ex: "pollutants" is formally associated with the
term "pollution" using the Related Term (RT)
relationship

In practice, we may be able to indicate explicitly that
"pollutants" cause "pollution“

=> Relationship becomes more meaningful than simply
portraying them as Related Terms (RT)


What more semantics means
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 Development Agricultural
Development
UF IFAD
acronym IFAD


From a traditional thesaurus to the Agricultural
Ontology Service Concept Server


Expressing AGROVOC in OWL


to facilitate its use for developing agricultural
domain knowledge organization systems,
including ontologies, without requiring the
terminologist to start from scratch

to enable the development of applications
using semantic technologies

to enable interoperability between applications
using these ontologies

to better support information management for
the web environment


AGROVOC Concept Server

It is a 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

Contains 600000 terms in around 20 languages.

Concepts may be also organized in multiple
categories.


Three levels of representation

Concepts (the abstract meaning)
−
Ex: ‘rice’ in the sense of a plant,

Terms (language-specific lexical forms)
−
Ex: ‘Rice’, ‘Riz’, ‘Arroz’, ‘ 稻米’ , or ‘Paddy’

Term variants (the range of forms that can
occur for each term)
−
Ex: ‘O. sativa’ or ‘Oryza Sativa’, ‘Organization’ or
Organisation’


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


In Action..........



http://www.ciard.net



The purpose of CIARD: think global,
act local
• “To facilitate an international community of practice in
agricultural science and technology information that
collaboratively develops common standards, shares
knowledge, and contributes to effective and coherent
institutional approaches.”

• CIARD partners will:
– combine/align efforts in common international approaches
– work with their own priorities and constraints
– maximise the return on public investments
• enable local/national innovation systems and services
To facilitate an international community of practice in agricultural
• harness support of regional/international systems
cience and technology information that collaboratively develops
ommon standards, shares knowledge, and contributes to effective
nd coherent institutional approaches.” FAO of the United Nations
Dr. Johannes Keizer,

A new partnership for truly accessible information

make agricultural research
information and knowledge truly
accessible to all


to enhance the use of agricultural research
information by all actors

to make key public organizations more responsible
for their information services

to adhere to common international standards and
open applications

to create user centered information services

to develop and share good practices

to act local and globally



http://www.fao.org/agris



Knowledge Processes and Repositories



.... and related Application Profiles/Ontologies

Document like Objects (Publications)

Events

News

Experts

Organizations

Projects

Learning Objects

Research Data

.......................


http://www.ciardring.net


What you can build out of it


Services that offer a common browsing or searching interface
to different sources

Integrated services providing relations between entities
(organizations, projects, experts, documents) through
semantic-web technologies

Services that interface the different knowledge organization
systems (KOS) used by different sources

Services providing advanced services like digests,
bibliographies, best practices, surveys etc.

etc...



CIARD RING Global Directories

Need for improved global access to information, but centralization of information
always failed!

Distributed architectures minimize duplication in information storage and flow
and improve the reliability of the information provided

Distributed storage and maintenance of data, The data describing any
information object (document, organization, project, event etc.) are stored
decentralized at the lowest level possible


They are accessible as XML/RDF records based on a specific metadata set

Centralized directories / registries to access the distributed sources

Access to these distributed files is facilitated by a community registry of
participating institutions


RING Exemple 1: Screenshot: RDF feed


Ring Exemple 2: Context sensitive linking



RING Exemple 2: Inclusion of Knowledge Models



Conclusions

No semantic Web without agreed vocabularies

Agreed vocabularies will exist only within
communities of practice – we need to build these
communities – CIARD is the practical proposal

We need Registries of those agreed vocabularies

FAO offers AIMS/AOS as the global gateway to
agreed vocabularies in Agriculture

FAO offers the AGROVOC CS Workbench as an
open Source Tool

We want your collaboration


Credits!

My wonderful team in Rome

Margherita Sini for the slides on AGROVOC

Valeria Pesce and Antonella Picarella for the slides on the
CIARD RING

All others for many contributions

Our network all over the world

Asanee Kawtrakul, Bangkok

Dagobert Soergel, Buffalo

Dan Brickley, Amsterdam

Valentina Presutti, Rome

An many, many others


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