Margherita Sini

Mapping AGROVOC and the Chinese Agricultural Thesaurus: Definitions, tools, procedures

This paper describes the procedures for a concept-based mapping of two agricultural thesauri, the multilingual AGROVOC, created and maintained by the Food and Agricultural Organization, and the bilingual Chinese Agricultural Thesaurus, created and maintained by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science. Conducted under the auspices of FAOs Agricultural Ontology Service, the mapping project aims to extend AGROVOC with an additional set of perspectives on the agricultural domains, enrich its domain and language coverage, and make use of AGROVOC as a common data model for data exchange among a wide range of multilingual repositories within agriculture.

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...

The OAEI food task: An analysis of a thesaurus alignment task

This paper describes the “food task” of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) 2006 and 2007. The OAEI (http://oaei.ontologymatching.org/) is a comparative evaluation effort to measure the quality of automatic ontology-alignment systems. The food task focuses on the alignment of thesauri in the agricultural domain. It aims at providing a realistic task for ontology-alignment systems by which the relative performance of the alignment systems can be evaluated. Research groups from around the world signed up their ontology-alignment system for the task. Each system automatically constructed an alignment. The alignments were then compared by means of statistical performance measures to get clues about which techniques work best for automatic ontology alignment. To complement this quantitative evaluation we performed an in-depth qualitative analysis of the results to draw conclusions about the strengths and weaknesses of the various alignment approaches and the specific challenges of thesaurus alignment and its evaluation.

Towards an infrastructure for semantic applications : Methodologies for semantic integration of heterogeneous resources

SUMMARY The semantic heterogeneity of Web information in the Agricultural domain presents tremendous information retrieval challenges. This article presents work taking place at the Food and Agriculture Organizations (FAO) that addresses this challenge. Based on the analysis of resources in the domain of agriculture, this paper proposes (a) an application profile (AP) for dealing with the problem of heterogeneity originating from differences in terminologies, domain coverage, and domain modelling, and (b) a root application ontology (AAO) based on the application profile which can serve as a basis for extending knowledge of the domain. The paper explains how even a small investment in the enhancement of relationships among vocabularies, both metadata and domain-specific, yield a relatively large return on investment.

Networked Ontologies from the Fisheries Domain

In this paper we report on ongoing work concerning the creation of a network of ontologies based on metadata for time series relative to the domain of fisheries, and hint at the possibility of exploiting the network for web service applications. The results obtained so far show that the reengineering of classification systems stored as relational databases is possible, although some technical problems is still to be addressed.