Boris Lauser

Comparing human and automatic thesaurus mapping approaches in the agricultural domain

Knowledge organization systems (KOS), like thesauri and other controlled vocabularies, are used to provide subject access to information systems across the web. Due to the heterogeneity of these systems, mapping between vocabularies becomes crucial for retrieving relevant information. However, mapping thesauri is a laborious task, and thus big efforts are being made to automate the mapping process. This paper examines two mapping approaches involving the agricultural thesaurus AGROVOC, one machine-created and one human created. We are addressing the basic question What are the pros and cons of human and automatic mapping and how can they complement each other? By pointing out the difficulties in specific cases or groups of cases and grouping the sample into simple and difficult types of mappings, we show the limitations of current automatic methods and come up with some basic recommendations on what approach to use when.

A comprehensive framework for building multilingual domain ontologies: creating a prototype biosecurity ontology

This paper presents our ongoing work in establishing a multilingual domain ontology for a biosecurity portal. As a prototypical approach, this project is embedded into the bigger context of the Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS) project of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN. The AOS will act as a reference tool for ontology creation assistance and herewith enable the transfer of the agricultural domain towards the Semantic Web. The paper focuses on introducing a comprehensive, reusable framework for the process of semi-automatically supported ontology evolvement, which aims to be used in follow-up projects and can eventually be applied to any other domain. Within the multinational context of the FAO, multilingual aspects play a crucial role and therefore an extendable layered ontology modelling approach will be described within the framework. The paper will present the project milestones achieved so far: the creation of a core ontology, the semiautomatic extension of this ontology using a heuristic toolset, and the representation of the resulting ontology in a multilingual web portal. The reader will be provided with a practical example for the creation of a specific domain ontology, which can be applied to any possible domain. Future projects, including automatic text classification, and ontology facilitated search opportunities, will be addressed at the end of the paper.

The AGROVOC Concept Server: rationale, goals and usage

Purpose – The main objective of the AGROVOC Concept Server (CS) is to create a collaborative reference platform and a “one‐stop” shop for a pool of commonly used concepts related to agriculture, containing terms, definitions and relationships between terms in multiple languages derived from various sources. This paper aims to address the issues.Design/methodology/approach – The CS offers a centralised facility where the agricultural information management community can build and share agricultural knowledge in a collaborative environment.Findings – The advantages of the CS are its extensibility and modularity that provide the possibility to extend the type of information that can be stored in this system based on user/community needs.Research limitations/implications – Further investigation still needs to be done on the modularisation of the CS (i.e. the creation of separated ontologies that can still be connected, in order to have domain‐related ontologies and to allow for better performance of the CS).P...

Pruning-based Identification of Domain Ontologies

We present a novel approach of extracting a domain ontology from large-scale the- sauri. Concepts are identified to be relevant for a domain based on their frequent occurrence in domain texts. The approach allows to bootstrap the ontology engineering process from given legacy thesauri and identifies an initial domain ontology that may easily be refined by experts in a later stage. We present a thorough evaluation of the results obtained in building a biosecurity ontology for the UN FAO AOS project.