Reorienting open repositories to the challenges of the Semantic Web: Experiences from FAO’s contribution to the resource processing and discovery cycle in repositories in the agricultural domain

Reorienting open repositories to the challenges of the
Semantic Web: Experiences from FAO’s contribution
to the resource processing and discovery cycle in
repositories in the agricultural domain

Imma Subirats*,Thembani Malapela*, Sarah Dister*,
Marcia Zeng**, Marc Gooaverts***, Valeria Pesce****,
Yves Jaques*, Stefano Anibaldi*, Johannes Keizer*
*F.A.O of the United Nations;
**** Kent State University (USA);
*** Hasselt University Library (Belgium);
**** Global Forum on Agricultural Research (Italy)

MTSR 2012
6th Metadata and Semantics Research Conference
28 -30th of November 2012 – Cádiz , Spain

PRESENTATION OUTLINE
 Introduction to Open Repositories
 Open Repositories & the Semantic Web

 Recommendations to Open Repositories
 Assuring Quality in Metadata Creation
 Aids to Navigation and Visibility

 FAO’s experiences and use cases in selected IM Tools
 In Conclusion:- Open Repositories future possibilities

28 -30th of November 2012 –C ádiz , Spain

Introduction to
Open
Repositories

OPEN REPOSITORIES
 “a digital archive created and maintained to provide universal
and free access to information … in … electronic format as a
means of facilitating research and scholarship” (Reitz, n.d).
http://unllib.unl.edu/LPP/hanief2.htm
 “The real value of repositories is their potential to be connected
in order to develop a network of repositories which enables
unified access to an open, aggregated mass of scholarship and
related materials that machines and researchers can work with
in new ways” ( COAR, 2012)


GROWTH OF OPEN
REPOSITORIES (1)
Open Access Repository directories ( November 2012)

 Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) –2,573 Repositories
 OpenDOAR – 2,230 repositories
 Repository66 – 2,311 repositories

GROWTH OF OPEN REPOSITORIES (2)
Content of Repositories

HOWEVER,..??
 “… most repositories are invisible, for example Google
Scholar had difficulty in indexing the contents of
institutional repositories..” (Artlitsch and O’Brien, 2012)
 Low rankings of most repositories by Webmetrics
Ranking.


OPEN REPOSITORIES & THE
SEMANTIC WEB
 open repositories should not only publish local
content globally, but also offer additional values to
researchers by harnessing participation from a broad
community of data providers (interoperability)

 The Semantic Web has further facilitated value
addition to research out-puts through automatic
discovery, linking and analysis

MTSR 2012
6 Metadata and Semantics Research Conference
th

28 -30th of November 2012 –C ádiz , Spai

OPEN REPOSITORIES & THE
SEMANTIC WEB

MTSR 2012
6 Metadata and Semantics Research Conference
th


CURRENT STATE OF REPOSITORY
INTEROPERABILITY INITIATIVES

MTSR 2012
28 -30th of November 2012 –C ádiz , Spain.

FAO’s
Recommendations
to Open Repositories


FAO’S EXPERIENCES IN AGRIS –A BASELINE
FOR METADATA STANDARDS FOR
AGRICULTURE
 From AGRIS Database (supported by AGRIS
network) to AGRIS Repository
 History , since 1975
 Data providers and the need for common
metadata sharing.
 The AGRIS Application Profile
 Properties for AGRIS AP
 AGRIS AP’s Limitations

OPEN REPOSITORIES SHOULD
ENSURE…
 their content is stable (browsable, searchable,
discoverable, and readable by both machines
and humans)
 they use appropriate metadata standards to
improve exchange across data silos;
 they use controlled vocabularies and ensure
that these are integrated within document
repository management systems

RECOMMENDATION ONE:- USE HIGH
QUALITY METADATA IN OPEN
REPOSITORIES
 FAO re-oriented its approach by providing a set of
recommendations with a full range of options for metadata
encoding from which bibliographic content providers could
choose according to their development stages, internal data
structures, and the reality of their current practices.
 The recommendations allow any content provider to encode
bibliographic data using properties from standardized
namespaces, to use well-established authority data and
controlled vocabularies available as linked data in agriculture
and to publish data in RDF


LINKED OPEN DATA ENABLED
BIBLIOGRAPHIC METADATA (LOBE BD)
VERSION 2.0
 LOBE BD provides flow chart to decide which
properties to use, and answers 4 Questions:-
 What kinds of entities and relationships are involved in bibliographic
re-source descriptions?
 What properties should be considered for publishing
meaningful/useful Linked Open Data-ready bibliographic data?
 What metadata standards should be used for preparing Linked Open
Data-ready bibliographic data?
 What metadata terms are appropriate in any given property for
producing Linked Open Data-ready bibliographic data from a local
database?


EXAMPLE : USING LOBE-BD IN
CHOOSING TITLE INFORMATION


RECOMMENDATION TWO : USE OF
CONTROLLED VOCABULARIES IN
REPOSITORIES
 “ In the context of the Semantic Web it has been
noted that the use of controlled vocabularies is
useful in the retrieval and discovery of resources
tagged with repository concepts” (Weller, K .2010)
 In the Agricultural Domain, FAO recommends
AGROVOC as a suitable controlled vocabulary for
Agriculture & related sciences.

http://aims.fao.org/standards/agrov
oc/linked-open-data


AGROVOC : SUITABLE FOR INDEXING
REPOSITORY CONTENTS IN
REPOSITORIES
 AGROVOC LOD has proven to be appropriate in the indexing
of repository contents in the semantic web environment.
 AGROVOC is aligned to more than 10 similar controlled
vocabularies, is available in 20+ languages and 40,000
concepts.
 Each AGROVOC concept is:

 uniquely identifiable with a web address;
 linked to other concepts (both AGROVOC and external)
using web addresses;
 available both as "machine-readable" structured data and
as "human-readable" web pages.

FAO’s experiences and
use cases in selected
IM Tools


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c ea g rio
riOao. or g/ a
A g
im s .f
w.a
ww Digital Repository
Management Software

USE CASE 1: AGRIOCEAN DSPACE (AOD)
In 2010, the United Nations agencies of FAO and UNESCO-IOC
announced a joint initiative to provide a customized version of
DSpace:
 to promote open access to scientific literature in the field of
oceanography, agriculture and related sciences available in digital
form;
 to assure good metadata quality and the use of thesauri and other
forms of authority control;
 to develop sustainable repositories that are more accessible and
visible;
 The customization is branded AgriOcean Dspace (AOD), and
integrates the previous developments of both UN agencies in one
customized version of DSpace.

AOD : HIGH QUALITY METADATA
 Promotes the use of AGRIS AP and MODS Metadata,
 Separate metadata for each content type

 Batch import module for AGRIS AP, EndNote and Web of
Science RIS Files
 Rich metadata in OAI-PMH
 AGRIS AP crosswalk:
to create a well formated XML for thesauri
<ags:subjectThesaurus xml:lang=“en” scheme="ags:ASFAT“>
Absolute food deficiency</ags:subjectThesaurus>
<ags:subjectThesaurus scheme="ags:ASFAT“>
http://aims.fao.org/aos/asfa/c_6 </ags:subjectThesaurus>
<ags:subjectThesaurus xml:lang=“en” scheme=“ags:AGROVOC” >
Agropisciculture</ags:subjectThesaurus>
<ags:subjectThesaurus scheme=“ags:AGROVOC”> http://www.fao.org/aims/aos/agrovoc#c_212
</ags:subjectThesaurus>

AOD : HIGH QUALITY METADATA (2)
 Authority Control on Journal Titles
 Possibility to add besides the title an issn if not available in the
authority list
 ISSN is copied to dc.identifier.issn

 title + volume + issue + start + end page > dc.identifier.citation


AOD : USE OF CONTROLLED
VOCABULARY
 Each Installation comes with AGROVOC and ASFA
thesaurus
 Work in progress on Ontology Plug in to add other

ontologies and controlled vocabularies


l rupal
pa agrid
Dru ols/
gri /to
A
o. org
s.fa
// aim
ht tp:
Content Management
System

USE CASE 2: AGRIDRUPAL
 In 2009, the FAO AIMS team initiated the project AgriDrupal
as a suite of solutions for agricultural information management
and dissemination, built on the Drupal platform, with special
functionalities for repository management.
 AgriDupal has since been offered to agricultural information
managers as an integrated solution to manage different types
of information such as organizations, expert profiles, news,
jobs, events, feeds, web pages, blog entries or forum topics.
It has advanced features for managing Open Access document
repositories in compliance with widely adopted library
standards


AGRIDRUPAL FEATURES
 import and export functionalities using the AGRIS-AP XML
format for bibliographic records and extended RSS for other
types of records;
 ability to index any content with AGROVOC terms;

 exposure of bibliographic records through the OAI-PMH
protocol supporting two metadata formats (Dublin Core and
AGRIS AP);
 support for implementing additional metadata standards;

 all the core Drupal Content Management features for
advanced management of any contents and customization of
the look and feel

...In Conclusion.


 Repositories should re-orient to fully meet the demands of
the semantic web;

 Interoperability should be the aim for repositories; and
institutional strategies that profit from the services made
available through interoperability initiatives should be invested
in;

 There still remain an opportunity for further research into
how open repositories can be migrated into the semantic web
by having them published as Linked Open Data.


Thank you for your attention
thembani.malapela@fao.org


Reorienting open repositories to the challenges of the Semantic Web: Experiences from FAO’s contribution to the resource processing and discovery cycle in repositories in the agricultural domain

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