interoperability in agricultural information systems: the necessity for international collaboration

3rd Symposium on Rural Knowledge Ontology - CAASS CAB

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

Interoperability in Agricultural Information Systems:The necessity for International collaborationAbstract: 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.



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%)

1969-1971: 878million (24%)



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.

HTML HTMLHTML

Users

HTMLHTMLHTML

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

TECABest practices

Country profiles CARIS WISARD AGRIS

HTML

Country NARS

HTML

ICARDA

HTML

AiDA

HTML

Crop database

HTML

OPACs

Disconnected repositories



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


Dr. Johannes Keizer, FAO of the United Nations

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



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.



Content

Query Expansion

Searching Heterogeneous Collections

Metadata Creation

Agrovoc

Geopolitical Ontology

AgMes Schemes

Domain

Ontologies

Vocabularies Registry

Web Services

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 meansMAIZE

UF corn NT flint maize NT popcorn NT sweet corn

MILKNT Milk Fat NT ColostrumNT Cow Milk

International Fund for Agricultural Development

UF IFAD

MAIZEsynonym cornsuperclass-of flint maize used-to-make popcorn hybridized-into sweet corn

MILKingredient Milk Fat ingredient Colostrumsuperclass-of Cow Milk

International Fund for Agricultural

Development

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• harness support of regional/international systems

– “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.”



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 actorsto make key public organizations more responsible for their information servicesto adhere to common international standards and open applicationsto create user centered information servicesto develop and share good practicesto 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

interoperability in agricultural information systems: the necessity for international collaboration

Education

caass cab http

caass cab http

caass cab dr

caass cab

interchange format

caass cab2009

agricultural research

technology information