Agricultural Ontology Web ServicesAgricultural Ontology Web Services

Striving for more interoperability in agricultural information management

OASIS Symposium 2006 9 May 2006

Boris Lauser Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Rome, Italy

OverviewOverview

• FAO and its role• Introduction to AGROVOC thesaurus• Present situation and problems• AGROVOC web services• AOS and AOS Concept Server• Outlook: AOS/CS web services

AGROVOC thesaurus Present Situation AGROVOC web services AOS Agricultural ontology web services

The role of the The role of the Food and Agriculture OrganizationFood and Agriculture Organization (FAO) (FAO)

The First Article of the FAO Constitution: “The Organization shall collect, analyse, interpret and disseminate

information relating to nutrition, food and agriculture.”

WAICENT: World Agricultural Information Centre• Knowledge Management• Information Dissemination• Collaboration with internal/external stakeholders• Promotion of Agricultural Information Management Standards

(AIMS)(bibliographical databases, use of metadata and knowledge organization systems (KOS) like thesauri, ontologies, etc.)

AGROVOC thesaurus Present Situation AGROVOC web services AOS Agricultural ontology web services

What is AGROVOC?What is AGROVOC?

• Multilingual Thesaurus;• Structured vocabulary to

cover terminology in agriculture, fisheries, forestry, food and related domains;

• Currently available in 14 languages;

• about 30.000 terms• Available online at

http://www.fao.org/aims/ag_alpha.htm.

AGROVOC thesaurus Present Situation AGROVOC web services AOS Agricultural ontology web services

Use of AGROVOC: Metadata from controlled Use of AGROVOC: Metadata from controlled vocabulariesvocabularies

AGROVOC thesaurus Present Situation AGROVOC web services AOS Agricultural ontology web services

Present SituationPresent Situation

AGROVOC thesaurusrelational database

master copy

local copyAGRIS center

Thailand

local copyAGRIS center

Venezuela

local copyAGRIS center

Ukraine

WebAGRISinput system

local copy x

local copy y

local copy z local thesaurusbrowser z

.....

AGROVOC thesaurus Present Situation AGROVOC web services AOS Agricultural ontology web services

ProblemProblem

request toadd new term“Avian Flu”

new term and relationships

added

local copyAGRIS center

Vietnam

local copyAGRIS center

Y

local copyAGRIS center

Z

Outdated!

need to create an updated export and resubmit the physical database to each AGROVOC user

AGROVOC thesaurus Present Situation AGROVOC web services AOS Agricultural ontology web services

Summary of ProblemsSummary of Problems

• Local databases are frequently outdated (AGROVOC updated 3-monthly);

• Overhead for FAO to export and send new copies with every update / new request;

• Local applications need to be customized to AGROVOC’s specific database structure;

• A new interface needs to be implemented on the local application level for each other thesaurus to be used.

AGROVOC thesaurus Present Situation AGROVOC web services AOS Agricultural ontology web services

The solution: web servicesThe solution: web services

AG

RO

VO

Cw

eb servicesinterface

update 1 update x...

java web services interface

SOAPWSDL

local application x

local application y

.....

AG

RO

VO

Cw

eb servicesinterface

SOAPWSDL

AGROVOC thesaurus Present Situation AGROVOC web services AOS Agricultural ontology web services

AGROVOC web serviceAGROVOC web service

Web service with 6 simple operations:

• getTermcodeByTerm • getTermByLanguage • getAllLabelsByTermcode • searchByTerm • getConceptByTerm • getDefinitions

sufficient for the most important thesaurus information http://www.fao.org/aims/ag_webservices.jsp

AGROVOC thesaurus Present Situation AGROVOC web services AOS Agricultural ontology web services

AGROVOC web servicesAGROVOC web services

implementationusing standardtechnologies

Eclipse Web Tools Platform

• SOAP• WSDL

Apache Tomcat

AGROVOC thesaurus Present Situation AGROVOC web services AOS Agricultural ontology web services

OWLWeb Ontology Language

Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS)Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS)

• Elevate terminology services to the semantic web;

• Transform AGROVOC thesaurus to AOS Concept Server;

• Move from proprietary relational databases to standard formats.

AGROVOC thesaurus Present Situation AGROVOC web services AOS Agricultural ontology web services

Agricultural Ontology Web ServicesAgricultural Ontology Web Services

Outlook on possible future web services:• Retrieval of standard OWL representation of

terminology;• Retrieval of semantically richer concepts;• Retrieval of semantically richer relationships;• Retrieval of more lexical information (synonyms,

acronyms, spelling variants...);• Automatic translation services;• Automatic text classification services;• Mapping services to other standard terminology

systems.

AGROVOC thesaurus Present Situation AGROVOC web services AOS Agricultural ontology web services

ReferencesReferences

• Agricultural Information Management Standards http://www.fao.org/aims

• AGROVOC Web Serviceshttp://www.fao.org/aims/ag_webservices.jsp

AGROVOC thesaurus Present Situation AGROVOC web services AOS Agricultural ontology web services

Thanks for your attentionThanks for your attention