Imma Subirats

Towards an architecture for open archive networks in agricultural sciences and technology

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore addressing the accessibility, availability and interoperability issues of exchanging agricultural research output by means of the AGRIS application profile – an exchange metadata standard – and controlled vocabularies or subject‐specific knowledge organisation systems.Design/methodology/approach – Based on an analysis of the open access (OA) publishing model and the open archives initiative (OAI), the authors share their proposal for the architecture for open archive networks in agricultural sciences and technology.Findings – The lack of adequate information exchange possibilities between researchers in food and agricultural sciences represents a significant weakness, limiting the research system to properly help address the issues of agricultural development. The OA publishing model promotes the availability of content online, including grey literature, which is not available through commercial distribution channels but which significantly contributes to ...

Reorienting Open Repositories to the Challenges of the Semantic Web: Experiences from FAO’s Contribution to the Resource Processing and Discovery Cycle in Repositories in the Agricultural Domain

The use of widely-used metadata standards is essential to guarantee the visibility and retrieval of documents stored in open repositories. Attention should be paid to the creation and exchange of meaningful metadata to enhance interoperability amongst repositories and provide value added services. Since 2005 the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) provides the agricultural information management community with standards, services and tools to assist open repositories in benefiting from the advantages offered by Semantic Web publishing. This paper presents the work that FAO carries out in recommending standards for the encoding and exchange of metadata while also reviewing techniques to help navigate within open repositories and services. It talks about how to improve the visibility of repository content and explains the benefits of integrating subject vocabulary tools expressed in SKOS.It concludes with a presentation of use cases integrating these recommendations into DSpace and Drupal customizations.

Developing data interoperability using standards: A wheat community use case

In this article, we present a joint effort of the wheat research community, along with data and ontology experts, to develop wheat data interoperability guidelines. Interoperability is the ability of two or more systems and devices to cooperate and exchange data, and interpret that shared information. Interoperability is a growing concern to the wheat scientific community, and agriculture in general, as the need to interpret the deluge of data obtained through high-throughput technologies grows. Agreeing on common data formats, metadata, and vocabulary standards is an important step to obtain the required data interoperability level in order to add value by encouraging data sharing, and subsequently facilitate the extraction of new information from existing and new datasets. During a period of more than 18 months, the RDA Wheat Data Interoperability Working Group (WDI-WG) surveyed the wheat research community about the use of data standards, then discussed and selected a set of recommendations based on consensual criteria. The recommendations promote standards for data types identified by the wheat research community as the most important for the coming years: nucleotide sequence variants, genome annotations, phenotypes, germplasm data, gene expression experiments, and physical maps. For each of these data types, the guidelines recommend best practices in terms of use of data formats, metadata standards and ontologies. In addition to the best practices, the guidelines provide examples of tools and implementations that are likely to facilitate the adoption of the recommendations. To maximize the adoption of the recommendations, the WDI-WG used a community-driven approach that involved the wheat research community from the start, took into account their needs and practices, and provided them with a framework to keep the recommendations up to date. We also report this approach’s potential to be generalizable to other (agricultural) domains.

AGRIS: providing access to agricultural research data exploiting open data on the web

AGRIS is the International System for Agricultural Science and Technology. It is supported by a large community of data providers, partners and users. AGRIS is a database that aggregates bibliographic data, and through this core data, related content across online information systems is retrieved by taking advantage of Semantic Web capabilities. AGRIS is a global public good and its vision is to be a responsive service to its user needs by facilitating contributions and feedback regarding the AGRIS core knowledgebase, AGRIS’s future and its continuous development. Periodic AGRIS e-consultations, partner meetings and user feedback are assimilated to the development of the AGRIS application and content coverage. This paper outlines the current AGRIS technical set-up, its network of partners, data providers and users as well as how AGRIS’s responsiveness to clients’ needs inspires the continuous technical development of the application. The paper concludes by providing a use case of how the AGRIS stakeholder input and the subsequent AGRIS e-consultation results influence the development of the AGRIS application, knowledgebase and service delivery.

FRBR implementation and user research

The IFLA Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) conceptual model, published in 1998, focuses on the representation of the bibliographic universe, using an entity-relationship model [1]. It has direct and great impact to the whole area of knowledge organization, especially the description, access, and sharing of bibliographic resources. As a conceptual model, FRBR is subject to various interpretations and implementations. This panel will focus on practical aspects of FRBR and related user studies: FRBR model validation, FRBR user research, FRBR/FAO model implementation and benefits, and RDA vocabulary developments based on FRBR.

Panel: Knowledge organization systems (KOS) as linked data services

Knowledge organization systems (KOS) are the key elements for interlinking the values of Linked Data datasets. Existing KOS products (including well-known thesauri and classification systems) need to be transformed into the constructs of Linked Data services, much more beyond what a traditional thesaurus or classification were/are developed, but how? What can these Linked Data KOS bring to various information services? The panelists will share their experiences and lessons learned. The presentation starts from the processes that have been developed to build, maintain, and publish a newly derived taxonomy using W3C SKOS standard, to make it extensible and scalable to support new information services in scholarly publishing workflow. The next presentation will share experiences and lessons learned from the implementation of a platform built for publishing and distribution of multiple KOS and for automatic indexing using these KOS. The third case is a Linked Data bibliographic service, a RDF-aware system and a mash up application which relies on the use of a multilingual thesaurus that has been published and maintained as a Linked Data dataset, and has been mapped to more than ten KOS. For the datasets that have not used standardized KOS, the panel will present methods that can be applied when generating or deriving project-focused micro-thesauri from the Linked Data KOS and give an overview of the use cases of Linked Data KOS in information services.