Thai AGROVOC Ontology Base for

Agricultural Information Retrieval

Fifth Agricultural Ontology Workshop27-29 April 2004

Aree Thunkijjanukijlibarn@ku.ac.th

Thai National AGRIS CentreKasetsart University, Bangkok

Thailand

Presentation Outline

Introducing Thai Agris Centre Present Obstacles Strategies and Solution for improvement Anticipated Outcomes How was the AGROVOC developed? Utilization and Demonstration Conclusion

Introducing Thai National AGRIS Centre

Thai National AGRIS Centre is the centre for agricultural information at

the national level. It was established in 1980 and has been operating within the

network of AGRIS-International Information System for the Agricultural Sciences and Technology for more than

24 years.

The Centre’s Missions

To be Thai Agricultural Knowledge Centre To collect and produce agricultural information To create Thailand Agricultural Database To coordinate and partner with AGRIS/FAO To provide international agricultural

information service To establish agricultural information network

within the country To encourage the development of agricultural

information system in Thailand

Present obstacles Linguistic phenomena

Same form but different meaning No words segmentation

การสมัมนาเชงิปฏิบติัการเรื่องออนโทโลยเีซอรว์สิด้านการเกษตร ครัง้ท่ี 5

Fifth Agricultural Ontology Service Workshop Lexicon coverage

Technical terms and Name Entities Hard to maintain

Indexing in English is not efficient and erroneous

Data retrieving deficiency (the retrieved document do not match the need of users)

Language barrier

Present obstacles (cont.)

Strategies for improvement

Increase indexing efficiency Create standard words for making

index in Thai Automatic assigned English descriptor

Increase retrieval efficiency Allow comprehensive and fast data

retrieval Multilingual document retrieval

Contributions of Thai AGROVOC ontology to the improvement of knowledge

management

Higher Quality of Knowledge repository Knowledge base for intelligent retrieval

system Automatic knowledge summarization

and machine translation

Thai AGROVOC Development

Project financial support from Kasetsart University Research and Development Institute and technical support from FAO.

Two phases implementation, developing Thai AGROVOC and adding words in local language and maintenance.

Subject 1 Subject 2 Subject 3 Subject…

Specialist 1 Specialist 2 Specialist 3 Specialist…

Thai Agricultural Thesaurus Development ProcessThai Agricultural Thesaurus Development Process

ThaiAgricultural

Database

Vocabulary•Natural Language Term•Controlled Term

Dictionaries

TextsModify

Frequency of words utilization

Experts

Thai New Terms

Non Descriptors

New Terms

Descriptors

DescriptorNon-Descriptor

FAO AGROVOC

NewDescriptor

New-NonDescriptor

Create HierarchicalRelationship

Processing

Modify

Thai AgriculturalThesaurus

New term number identification

Translate into English

AddingNew Term

Thai AGROVOC

Check duplicationCorrection

Thai AGROVOC Preliminary Edition

DescriptorNon-Descriptor

ThaiAGROVOC Term

Correction

Thai AGROVOC 1st Edition

Experts

Modify

Public Hearing

Expert Comment

FAOAGROVOC

Translate

Thai Agricultural Database

Thai Agricultural Terms in Thai AGROVOC ProcessThai Agricultural Terms in Thai AGROVOC Process

Titles41,945

Descriptors50,660

Deletereplicated term

Thai Agricultural Terms47,692

Check withAGROVOC

Replicated with AGROVOC

(4,809 descriptors)11,582

Not replicated with AGROVOC

36,110

Assign to Thai AGROVOC New Terms

Thai AGROVOC 1st edition (http://pikul.lib.ku.ac.th/)

Thai AGROVOC for indexing

Thai AGROVOC for retrieval

Thai AGROVOC for Intelligent search

Capacity building: the collaboration with computer engineering research unit, NaiST Laboratory

Reduce cost and increase performance, Creating ontology base is very time and cost consuming. The endeavor has to utilize countless experts in many fields, in addition to a lot of personnel for data recording and processing.

Maintenance thesaurus in terms of adding word and create hierarchical relation is extremely difficult due to lack of efficient tool.