the agricultural ontology service: a proposal to create a knowledge organisation framework in the...

The Agricultural Ontology Service: A Proposal to Create a Knowledge Organisation Framework in the Area of Food and Agriculture

Johannes Keizer, Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, Library and Documentation Systems Division

Kick Off Workshop Rome 14th/15th November 2001

The Agricultural Ontology Service:A Proposal to Create a Knowledge

Organisation Framework in the Area of Food and Agriculture

Johannes Keizer, Frehiwot Fisseha, Kat Hagedorn

and Stephen Katz,

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Library and Documentation Systems Division



Kick Off Workshop Rome 14th/15th November 2001 Slide 2

The Mandate of FAO

• Goal of FAO is to reduce hunger in the world and to improve living conditions

• WAICENT (World Agricultural Information Center) is FAO’s approach to fight hunger with information

• FAO itself produces huge amount of content in its subject area

• It is also within FAO’s mandate to make available useful information from other information providers

• FAO collaborates in information networks




Overview

• The background of the project

• Ontologies -- what this means for us

• Some points on the AOS project

• Possible next steps




Background 1: Existing Thesauri

• FAO has maintained the multilingual thesaurus AGROVOC since the early 80s

• Other consistent thesauri are maintained by CABI in England and the National Agricultural Library in the States

• Various other knowledge organization systems are scattered around the world

• The existing systems are language biased, with English as the leading language

• None of the systems is satisfactory for resource description and discovery purposes




Background 2: Thesauri Contain Knowledge

• Thesauri were mostly used only for indexing and to help users in searching

• But thesauri are already knowledge organization systems

• Not only the vocabulary of concepts, but also the defined relations (BT, NT, RT, UF …) contain domain knowledge

• This knowledge can be leveraged using web technology




Background 3: the Origin of the Project

• Born as the AGROVOC Taxonomy Server• Agronomists were upset with the word taxonomy• IT people were upset about the word server• The word ontology started to become sexy• We learned that taxonomies are important

building blocks for ontologies• But do we know really what an ontology is?• And the detailed structure and function of the

Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS) is still to be defined




Ontologies: What We’ve Heard

• The term “ontology” has been used for a number of years by the artificial intelligence and knowledge representation community but is now becoming part of the standard terminology of a much wider community including information systems modelling and XML

• An ontology is a vocabulary of terms and relations rich enough to enable us to express knowledge and intention without semantic ambiguity

• Ontology describes domain knowledge in a generic way and provides an agreed-upon understanding of a domain

• Ontology is THE key technology in semantic information processing




Ontologies: Definitions

An ontology may take a variety of forms, but

- it always includes a vocabulary of concepts and specification of their meanings

- we are in a strong position to produce an ontology, as one of the biggest content providers in the area of agricultural information




Ontologies: What We Expect Them To Do

• Facilitate communication among people and organizations

• Aid human communication and shared understanding by specifying meaning

• Facilitate communications among systems i.e., to achieve inter-operability

• Enable sharing and re-use of domain knowledge• Make domain assumptions explicit• Help to analyse domain knowledge




Ontologies: The Practical Purposes

• For information resource description– To annotate web pages or documents with meaning– To provide context based organisation (semantic

clustering) of information resources

• For information resource discovery– As a knowledge management tool for selective

semantic access (meaning-oriented access)– As a tool for intelligent search instead of keyword

matching (information retrieval) to query answering (information extraction)




AOS: Registry

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)




AOS: Structure Proposals (1)

URI, e.g., www.agri-ontology.org/2050.xml

Definitions

Labels

Relations

??????

ConceptAttributes

Responsible Party





Type of Relation

Used in Domain

??????

AttributeProperties

Relation





Language

Spell

Used in Domain

AttributeProperties

Label




AOS: Iterative Knowledge Registration

KOS partner

KOS application

KOS uses components to build

an application

Discussions and choices for amendments to

components

KOS partner

Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS)Federated storage and

description facility

Components: terms, definitions,

relationships

Components: terms, definitions,

relationships

Users search and browse application using

components

User feedback




AOS: Possible Use... (1)

Records found: 5

1. xxxxxxxxxxx

2. xxxxxxxxxxx

3. xxxxxxxxxxx

4. xxxxxxxxxxx

5. xxxxxxxxxxx

BiotopesCropping systems using forestsEconomics of forest productionForestry equipmentSoil science

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Forest rights issuesParasites of forestsPesticides used in forestsTypes of forest productsUses of forest products

Geographic area

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x

Africa

Web pageType of resource




AOS: Possible Use... (2)

Conservation agriculture

Farmers like it because it gives them a means of conserving, improving and making more efficient use of their natural resources

About camels and llamas

Descendants of the same rabbit-sized mammal, they have become two of humanity's most versatile domestic animals

Agribusiness and small farmers

Well managed contract farming contributes to both increased income for producers and higher profits for investors

Toward biosecurity

Biological and environmental risks associated with food and agriculture have intensified with economic globalization

Urban food marketing

In the “century of cities”, a major challenge will be providing adequate quantities of nutritional and affordable food for urban inhabitants

Crop science and ethics

In order to continue their contribution to human development, crop scientists must regain credibility

Use your right mouse button to learn more about an italicized word on the page.

Biosecurity:management of all biological and environmental risks associated with food and agriculture, including forestry and fisheries

See also:BiosafetyFood SafetyRisk Management

Or are you interested in...:Food SecurityBiological Diversity

Agricultural Web Page




AOS: The Next Steps

• The concept note has found interest in the domain area -- comments are mostly encouraging from both subject specialists and ontology developers

• Participation in this workshop: – FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization)

– CABI (CAB International)

– Various FAO groups (Fishery, Forestry, Nutrition)

– University of Florida (Agricultural Department)

– National Agriculture Research Center (Japan)

– Participants from the OntoWeb Initiative

– And many others...




The Workshop and our Expectations

• Discuss the goals and the feasibility of the project

• Shape the structure and the functionality of an Agricultural Ontology Service

• Define the possible collaborations and the necessary management and maintenance structures

• Set up a team of organizations and interested experts to write a definite project proposal




Discussion Points

What kind of need do you see for a meta-ontology paralleling what the UMLS has done? For what would you use such a system?

Is it conceivable to run this project as a series of pilot projects with subject domains (e.g., forestry, fisheries, sustainable development, crop wild relatives) – in the end building the complete AOS?

What issues do you see regarding the building of ontological associations?

Who should participate in the project as full partners and who as peripheral partners? What are their respective responsibilities?

Who are the primary and secondary user types for the AOS? What toolkit will be needed to create and maintain the AOS?

What are the components of this toolkit? What encoding standards should be used (e.g., RDF,

DAML+OIL)?




http://www.fao.org/agris

http://www.fao.org/agrovoc

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

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