FAO's work focuses on reducing hunger and improving living conditions by collecting, analyzing, interpreting and disseminating agricultural information. The organization developed metadata standards and application profiles to facilitate information sharing, including the AGRIS Application Profile for bibliographic records and a Learning Resources Application Profile. FAO also maintains AGROVOC, an agricultural ontology to enhance subject indexing and retrieval across languages.

1. Work on Agricultural Information Management at FAO (2000 – to date) Gauri Salokhe [email_address]

2. FAO’s Work Goal of FAO is to reduce hunger in the world and to improve living conditions FAO itself produces huge amounts of content in its subject areas The First Article of the FAO Constitution: “ The Organization shall collect, analyse, interpret and disseminate information relating to nutrition, food and agriculture .”

3. Starting Points in 2000 AGRIS (FAO Documentation) AGROVOC Is there any need to invest in metadata and vocabularies in the age of electronic information? First Steps: Brussels meeting (on Standards for electronic publishing) and AGstandards initiative First participation in Dublin Core initiative

4. Our Work Metadata Standards

5. Resources we are dealing with.. Document – Like Information Objects (DLIOs) Learning resources Organizations Projects News and Events

6. Document – Like Information Objects - About Starting point was the AGRIS Database, which gathers bibliographic information from over 200+ centres from across the world It currently contains 2.5 million bibliographic records. Before the year 2000, participating centers were forced to use a proprietary software or complicated format conversions were necessary at the central database

7. The Idea center3 center1 center2 NEW service 2 common exchange layer service etc. center2 center1 center3 NEW services

8. Document – Like Information Objects – Our Proposal The AGRIS Application Profile (AGRIS AP) a standard created specifically to enhance exchange of metadata It is a metadata schema which draws elements from well known Metadata standards such as Dublin Core (DC) Australian Government Locator Service Metadata (AGLS) Agricultural Metadata Element Set (AgMES) namespaces It allows sharing of information across dispersed bibliographic systems and provides guidelines on recommended best practices for cataloguing and subject indexing.

9. AGRIS AP, extends the DC

10. Why not simple DC? Citation For example, the citation information using AGRIS AP is displayed as: <ags:citation> <ags:citationTitle>Journal of Agricultural Research and Extension (Thailand)</ags:citationTitle> <ags:citationTitle>Warasan Wichai Lae Songsoem Wichakan Kaset</ags:citationTitle> <ags:citationIdentifier scheme=&quot;ags:ISSN&quot;>0125-8850</ags:citationIdentifier> <ags:citationNumber>18(2) p.1-12</ags:citationNumber> <ags:citationChronology>Apr-Sep 2001</ags:citationChronology> </ags:citation> The dumbing down process would result in the information being merged and presented as: <dc:relation> Journal of Agricultural Research and Extension (Thailand); Warasan Wichai Lae Songsoem Wichakan Kaset; 18(2) p.1-12; ISSN: 0125-8850; Apr-Sep 2001</dc:relation>

11. Why not simple DC? Relation For example, the relation information using AGRIS AP is displayed as: <dc:relation> <dcterms:isVersionOf>http://www.fao.org/agris/agmes/DC1-FAO1.doc </dcterms:isVersionOf > <ags:relationHasTranslation>ftp://ftp.fao.org/fao/W8270c.pdf </ags:relationHasTranslation> </dc:relation> The dumbing down process would result in the information being merged and presented as: <dc:relation> http://www.fao.org/agris/agmes/DC1-FAO1.doc</dc:relation> <dc:relation> ftp://ftp.fao.org/fao/W8270c.pdf </dc:relation >

12. Current Status FAO has converted the central database to XML Now all active AGRIS Centres are sending data in AGRIS AP XML format. The standard has been adopted by: Global Forestry Information System (GFIS) Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR)

13. http://oai.bibsys.no/repository?verb=listRecords&metadataPrefix=agris&set=agris

14. The AGRIS-AP & the new AGRIS network Data Management Archival Storage Access Description Cataloguing Metadata Export Dublin Core Unqualified MARC21 AGRIS AP Self-archiving

15. The AGRIS-AP & the new AGRIS network Figure 2. Agris Network: Content Management . The Figure 2 shows the main elements in the workflow for AGRIS Network and their connections following the new architecture. Conceptually, the workflow is divided in two principal actions: content management and exposing metadata . Information Management Specialist Metadata + Full text Software AGRIS Website Agris Service Providers Standards Users Researcher Open Access External Service Providers Agris Data Providers Content Management Self Archiving Knowledge Exchange Directories Methods Internet

16. DLIO - Tools ME TAMAKE R

17. DLIO – Services ( http://www.fao.org/agris/search )

18. Document – Like Information Objects – Next Steps AGRIS Ontology Project

19. Services – Navigation of objects Cross-searching of objects using AGROVOC Keywords

20. Services – One click re-query of Data Traversing the URIs

21. Learning resources - About The United Nations General Assembly recognizes the crucial role of capacity building for achieving the Millennium Development Goals It has called upon the United Nations organizations to increase their support to developing countries’ own efforts. Capacity and institution building is a core function of FAO

22. Learning resources – Our Proposal In order to provide structured access to FAO’s agricultural learning resources and capacity and institution building services, the “Capacity and Institution Building Portal” project was started in 2006. A metadata standard was needed to assure that each resource will be described appropriately.

23. Learning resources - the metadata (DC) Title (AGS) Supplement Title (DC) Creator (DC) Subject (AGS) subjectCategories (AGS) subjectThesaurus (DC) Description (DCTERMS) Abstract (AGS) Notes (DC) Publisher (DCTERMS) Date (DC) Type (DC) Format-Type (LOM) Aggregation Level (LOM) Size (DC) Identifier (DC) Language (DC) Relation (DCTERMS) Coverage (DC) Rights (LOM) Cost (LOM) Intended End User Role (LOM) Context (LOM) Interactivity Level (LOM) Typical Learning Time

24. Learning resources – Next Steps The “Capacity and Institution Building Portal” will be made available to FAO staff and member countries towards the end of the year Approximately, 300+ records have been identified in FAO as learning resources. Metadata for these resources is being created according to the Learning Resources AP Strong collaboration with the UNESCO (and CGIAR) initiatives

28. FAO and Dublin Core Dublin Core Education Metadata Working Group Review the Dublin Core Education Profile FAO is contributing Use Cases

29. Learning Resources Task Force To set up a network of organizations to facilitate sharing and reusing of learning resources To provide guidance , standards , technologies , tools , recommendations , and best practices .

30. Goals of the Task Force Set up a community Create an inventory E-conference Producing an initial set of best practice recommendations Deploying a pilot demonstrator of federating learning repositories metadata

31. Our aims is to support sharing! Data Provider: exposes resources Development Agencies and NGOs Research Institutions Industry Information Centres Service Provider: provides services based on these resources Aggregators Thematic or Regional views

32. Organizations - About Information on agricultural organizations is available from many different information services with independent databases. Very few of these systems share data among themselves and in no case do they coherently integrate data. This translates into three major difficulties: maintenance is costly; similar (but incomprehensive) information is available from several sources; visibility in all the existing databases requires submitting the same data to multiple databases.

33. Organizations – Our Proposal Provide a web-based tool that allows everyone to create metadata about their organization. The tool will come with guidelines on &quot;how-to&quot; create the metadata file. The XML file will be stored on institutes’ webserver and the URL will be registered in a central server The central server can be exploited to create other value-added services as desired. Periodic update requests will be sent out to all the organizations.

34. Organizations – the metadata (AGS) organizationName (AGS) fullOrganizationName (AGS) organizationAcronym (AGS) address (AGS) streetAddress (AGS) country (AGS) telephone (AGS) fax (AGS) telex (AGS) email (DC) identifier (scheme “dcterms:URI”) (DC) description (DC) subject (AGS) subjectThesaurus (AGS) organizationType (DC) relation (DCTERMS) isPartOf (sugg: scheme “dcterms:URI”) (DCTERMS) replaces (sugg: scheme “dcterms:URI”) (DC) date (DCTERMS) created (DCTERMS) modified

35. Organizations – Next Steps The “metamaker” The registry is being developed by our partner organization the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR) Data will be collected by targeting the partner organizations (GFAR, GFIS etc.)

36. Projects - About Repositories of Project metadata exist but... maintenance is costly; similar (but incomprehensive) information is available from several sources; visibility in all the existing databases requires submitting the same data to multiple databases. Promote data sharing

37. Projects – Our Proposal To develop core data standard Provide user friendly documentation and best practices Provide machine-readable encoding (such as eXtensible Markup Language) to allow automatic validation of shared information. Partner organization (WIS International), with FAO and GFAR, is developing a proposal for the metadata standard.

38. Projects – the metadata Project Name Project Code : What is on the document Project Description Project Objectives Project Subject subject categories (ASC) keywords (AGROVOC) Project Budget Project Duration start date end date extension date Project identifier (URL) Project status Project coverage.spatial Donor(s) Participating organizations : Organizations that have received funding and are carrying out the project. name acronym address (City, Country) Coordinator Contact name Contact organization Contact email Contact telephone

39. Projects – Next Steps Get an agreement from partners on the elements Provide a XML DTD for validation of the metadata files Promote the standard as a possible “means” for sharing project information without going into too many details Create a registry

40. News and Events - About An event is defined here as “something that happens at a given place and time.” An event can be broken into different ‘subsets’, for example by day or session. In this document, it will be the larger entity that will be addressed. For example, some of the events in FAO are: Eighth AOS Workshop -- 7 years of AOS: Achievements and Next Steps , Rome, Italy, 21-22 September 2007 Special Session on Agricultural Metadata & Semantics : 2nd International Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research (MTSR'07), Greece, October 11-12, 2007

41. News and Events - About At present, the sharing is done in a ad-hoc manner, leading to specialized formats and incompatible exchange models. the exports are done without using a standard set of elements. This limits creation of value-added services such as calendars.

42. News and Events – Our Proposal In the case of News , we use standard RSS news format. The basic requirements are elements provided by the RSS standard: <link>, <title>, and <description> In the case of Events , an expanded metadata set was proposed. RSS feeds that comply with the proposal can be registered at www.agrifeeds.org

43. News and Events – the metadata (AGS) dateStart (AGS) ags:dateEnd (AGS) location (AGS) locationCity (AGS) locationCountry (DC) type (AGS) organizer <ags:dateStart schema=&quot; dcterms:W3CDTF &quot;> 2007-09-21 </ags:dateStart> <ags:dateEnd schema=&quot; dcterms:W3CDTF &quot;> 2007-09-22 </ags:dateEnd> <ags:location> <ags:locationCity> Rome </ags:locationCity> <ags:locationCountry schema=&quot; dcterms:ISO3166 &quot;> ITA </ags:locationCountry> </ags:location> <dc:type> Workshop </dc:type> <ags:organizer> Food and Agriculture Organization </ags:organizer>

44. News and Events – Next Steps Agrifeeds launched in September 2007 The “metamaker” is under construction (GFIS) Data will be collected by targeting webmasters (GFAR, GFIS etc.)

45. News and Events – Tools

46. Our Work II Vocabularies

47. Agricultural Domain AGROVOC NAL Thesaurus CABI Thesaurus Dedicated KOSs Non-dedicated KOSs e.g., ASFA thesaurus e.g., the Multilingual Forestry Thesaurus e.g., the Sustainable Development website classification e.g., biological taxonomies such as NCBI and ITIS GEMET Other thematic thesauri Existing Thesauri and Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs) Common concepts are not declared No or very limited interoperability Insufficient subject + language coverage Severe maintenance problems Very limited machine readability Only very simple encoding of semantic relations

48. AGROVOC Development (1982–2007) 28 435 Electronic ed., 2007 http://www.fao.org/aims/ag_intro.htm 16 607 4 th ed., 1999/2000 16 107 3 rd ed., 1995 14 714 2 nd ed., 1992 8 660 1 st ed., 1982 no. of descriptors Edition, Year

49. Development (1982–2007)

50. Multilinguality

51. Formats AGROVOC is available in following formats for free downloading (non-commercial use): MySQL MS Access SKOS Postgres OWL TagText ISO2709 others Up to now 500 users have downloaded AGROVOC (in 14 months ~ 35 downloads each month) AGROVOC Web services allows users to connect directly to the AGROVOC Thesaurus

52. i

53. AGROVOC Concept Server Concept-based (as opposed to term-based) Enriched semantics in RT relationships Develop specialized sub-domain ontologies, such as Fisheries ontology Thai plant ontology Food safety ontology Crop-wild ontology Geopolitical ontology for FAO information systems Organization ontology, etc.

54. Concept Terms Strings Concept Relationships between concepts Lexicalization/ Term String Relationships between strings Relationships between terms designated by manifested as Other information: language/culture subvocabulary/scope audience type, etc. annotation relationship Relationship Relationships between Relationships Note

55. USE/UF Concept c_167 term i_en_ african_buffaloes African buffaloes has_lexicalization Concept c_1040 subclassof Concept c_3182 RTs.... rdfs:label: has_synonym has_translation term i_en_buffaloes_syncerus Buffaloes (syncerus) term i_es_búfalo_africano Búfalo africano term i_zh_ 非洲水牛 非洲水牛 term i_ja_ アフリカ水牛 アフリカ水牛 term i_es_búfalo_syncerus Búfalo (syncerus)

56. AGROVOC Concept server Workbench ipunt AOS/CS Workbench concordance pattern-matching multilingual input .doc, .pdf, .xml, etc. Concept Hierarchy text corpus

57. Geo-Political Ontology Names official and short names: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Spanish, other.... Codes UN code – M49 ISO-3166 Alpha-2 and Alpha-3 UNDP code GAUL code FAOSTAT AGROVOC Coordinates Max, Min Latitude Max, Min Longitude

58. Requirements – dynamics To track historical changes West Germany East Germany Germany From 1990 to present Czech Republic Slovakia Czechoslovakia From 1993 to present

59. Requirements - neighboring territories To compare data on certain subjects India neighboring countries: Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, etc.

61. Why all this?

62. Our Vision Shared layer of interoperability Value-added Information Services Distributed Datasets AOS Aggregated Database View Subject-specific Portals Open URL or OAI based services Information System (n) Web Services Database ... Database Websites Metadata ontologies (Application Profiles) Subject ontologies XML Bus

63. Lessons Learned

64. Don’t Give Up! We had to struggle with acceptance in-house Implementation of the AGRIS AP many discussions about: too many elements too complicated ....but we did not surrender

65. Don’t Give Up! AGROVOC Model SKOS discussions (Our model was too complicated) Some weeks ago Alistair Miles from W3C working group sent out a proposal for Label relations  Some Failed projects that we can learn from Antimicrobials Online SWTFOS ECOTERM IPFSAPH

66. Ontologies on demand only! First AOS workshop decided about Ontology prototypes (Fishery, Food Safety...) Fishery: lot of conceptual work without real demand or application bulky construction with no real use case NeOn has the involvement of partners and application Food Safety: a food safety ontology was created using AGROVOC, expert knowledge and text mining, but it did not fit the needs of the application (IPFSAPH) These were useful experiences, but not the way to go for developing full fledged ontologies

67. Our work and the Semantic Web

68. Recent remarks.. Of Tim Berner’s Lee A web of data Channelling existing structured data into the semantic web Using existing large databases Creating data exchange profiles http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=518&tag=nl.e622

69. Where we are now... ©Berners-Lee

70. Our Vision Shared layer of interoperability Value-added Information Services Aggregated Database View Subject-specific Portals Open URL or OAI based services Information System (n) Web Services Distributed Datasets Database ... Database Websites Metadata ontologies (Application Profiles) Subject ontologies XML Bus AOS

71. Semantic Web“space” Not a semantic web, but a semantic space in the web for communities (Semantic Applications) Network of Data and Service Providers with agreed procedures and standards (common ontological layers)

72. Semantic Web“space” Data Provider: exposes institutional open archives of data and information Development Agencies and NGOs Research Institutions Industry Information Centres Service Provider: provides services based on these institutional open archives Libraries and other traditional Aggregators Thematic or Regional Centres of Excellence The data providers themselves

73. Challenge in all this..

74. Challenges related to ... Priorities What do we need most? What can we achieve in measurable time? Impact How to reach out effectively? killer application/s? Community How can we improve collaboration? How can we exploit synergies and comparative advantages? Sustainability How can we assure services for a given range of time? Who will give us the money?

75. www.fao.org/aims

76. The names behind the work at FAO Stefano Anibaldi Andrew Bagdanov Claudio Baldassarre Caterina Caracciolo Marta Iglesias Gudrun Johannsen Stefka Kaloyanova Stephen Katz J ohannes Keizer Soonho Kim Irene Onyancha Boris Lauser Yuan Oktafian Stefano Pesci Valeria Pesce Gauri Salokhe Margherita Sini Imma Subirats Virginie Viollier Maria Folch Kirsten Geist Kris Jelinek Ex colleagues: Frehiwot Fisseha, Anita Liang, Fynvola Le Hunte Ward, Jim Weinheimer, Kat Hagadorn

77. Partners ARD Prasad, Aree Thunkijjanukij, Asanee Kawtrakul, Chandima Gunadasa, Chang Chun, Dagobert Soergel, Eero Mikkola, Enrica Porcari, Jai Haravu, Jayanta Chatterjee, Michael Hailu, TVP Prabhakar, Wang Zhong, Ze Li and many more..

78. Thank you! [email_address]