Valeria Pesce

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.

Preliminary Work towards Publishing Vocabularies for Germplasm and Soil Data as Linked Data

The agINFRA project focuses on the production of interoperable data in agriculture, starting from the vocabularies and Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs) used to describe and classify them. In this paper we report on our first steps in the direction of publishing agricultural Linked Open Data (LOD), focusing in particular on germplasm data and soil data, which are still widely missing from the LOD landscape, seemingly because information managers in this field are still not very familiar with LOD practices.

Developing Agricultural Research Information Systems: The experience of the Global Forum on Agricultural Research

The Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR) is a platform at the global level for dialogue and action of all stakeholders of agricultural research and innovation for development (ARD). Improving sharing and exchange of information that contributes to agricultural research for development is one of the primary actions of GFAR. This paper will describe GFAR’s experiences in fostering and supporting the development agricultural research information systems at national, regional and global levels, illustrating the evolution of the overall approach, the initiatives of the various stakeholders and the experiences with different technologies. A description of the evolution of the approach in building agricultural information systems and an overview of the major services implemented over the last decades and their technological features will demonstrate that creating integrated information services giving access and adding value to information that is electronically available, especially through semantics, remains a major challenge. In order for this to be achieved, the existing sources of information must become really interoperable and allow for easy automatic retrieval of information, and work on mapping between vocabularies or advanced natural language processing must be done for improving the semantic accessibility of information.

A distributed architecture for harvesting metadata describing organizations in the agriculture sector

Providing easy access to updated, accurate and semantically meaningful information about organizations working in the agriculture sector is of primary importance in agricultural information management. Many databases of these organizations already exist but none are comprehensive and all differ in coverage (often overlapping), semantic organization, being up-to-date, quantity and quality of the information they provide. In addition, only very few information systems share and exchange data among themselves. This paper describes a distributed architecture which minimizes duplication in information storage and flow and improves quality of the information provided. In this architecture the data describing an organization are stored in a file as an XML description based on a specific metadata set, and access to these distributed files is facilitated by a central registry file. The proposed metadata set is also discussed, with special focus on those aspects that help to make the architecture coherent.

Setting up a Global Linked Data Catalog of Datasets for Agriculture

The movement to share data has been on the rise in the last decade and lately in the agricultural domain. Similarly platforms for publishing scientific and statistical datasets have sprouted and have improved visibility and availability of datasets. Yet there are still constraints in making datasets discoverable and re-usable. Commonly agreed semantics, authority lists to index datasets and standard formats and protocols to expose data are now essential. This paper explains how the CIARD RING provides a global linked data catalog of datasets for agriculture. The first part of this paper will describe the Linked Data layer of the CIARD RING focusing on the data model, semantics used and the CIARD RING LOD publication. The second part will provide examples of re-use of data from the RING. The paper concludes by describing the future steps in the development of the CIARD RING.