Stephen Katz

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...

Metadata Application Profile for Agricultural Learning Resources

Capacity and institution building is a core function of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO). FAO has recently started the “Capacity and Institution Building Portal” to provide structured access to information on FAO’s capacity and institution building services and learning resources. To ensure that the Portal can be searched by users and to enable interoperability with other recognized educational repositories, an Application Profile (AP) was created conforming to available and commonly used standards, to describe agricultural learning resources. This article presents the AP, provides an example of an FAO learning resource described and displayed using FAO Learning Resource AP, and presents the lessons learned.

Networks and communities at FAO: using lessons learned to nurture a learning organisation

In mid-2008, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) completed a review of its experiences with knowledge networks and communities. The review methodology included a series of focus groups and interview discussions with network sponsors, coordinators and members. Data from the focus groups were qualitative, and the findings were subjected to a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis. A range of key factors were identified for the networks and communities to thrive and to be useful to the organization, including the need to sponsor from top, to ensure the right blend of membership, to support demand, to ensure a sound business case, to facilitate continuously, to encourage flexibility, to recognize staff time, to promote the network(s), and to monitor and evaluate. The analysis further revealed the need to cultivate an understanding of knowledge sharing in the organization, to create incentives for participating in networks and communities, and to support the proliferation and growth of networks and communities with human resources initiatives and appropriate technical platforms. The lessons learned and recommendations from the review have informed the recently formulated FAO Knowledge Strategy, and they will continue to be leveraged in the implementing of the strategy, and in enabling FAO as a learning organization.