Yves Jaques

The AGROVOC Linked Dataset

Born in the early 1980s as a multilingual agricultural thesaurus, AGROVOC has steadily evolved over the last fifteen years, moving to an electronic version around the year 2000, and embracing the Semantic Web shortly thereafter. Today AGROVOC is a SKOS-XL concept scheme published as Linked Open Data, containing links as well as backlinks and references to many other Linked Datasets in the LOD cloud. In this paper we provide a brief historical summary of AGROVOC and detail its specification as a Linked Dataset.

Thesaurus maintenance, alignment and publication as linked data: the AGROVOC use case

The AGROVOC multilingual thesaurus maintained by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations is now published as linked data. In order to reach this goal AGROVOC was expressed in Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) and its concepts provided with dereferenceable URIs. AGROVOC is now aligned with ten other multilingual Knowledge Organisation Systems (KOS) related to agriculture, using the SKOS properties exact match and close match. Alignments were automatically produced in Eclipse using a custom-designed tool and then validated by a domain expert. The resulting data is publicly available to both humans and machines using a SPARQL endpoint together with a modified version of Pubby, a lightweight front-end tool for publishing linked data. This paper describes the process that led to the current linked data AGROVOC and discusses current and future applications and directions. This paper extends a shorter version presented at MTSR 2011.

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.

Thesaurus Maintenance, Alignment and Publication as Linked Data: The AGROOVOC Use Case

The AGROVOC multilingual thesaurus maintained by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is now published as linked data. In order to reach this goal AGROVOC was expressed in Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), and its concepts provided with dereferenceable URIs. AGROVOC is now aligned with ten other multilingual knowledge organization systems related to agriculture, using the SKOS properties exact match and close match. Alignments were automatically produced in Eclipse using a custom-designed tool and then validated by a domain expert. The resulting data is publicly available to both humans and machines using a SPARQL endpoint together with a modified version of Pubby, a lightweight front-end tool for publishing linked data. This paper describes the process that led to the current linked data AGROVOC and discusses current and future applications and directions.

Discovering, Indexing and Interlinking Information Resources

The social media revolution is having a dramatic effect on the world of scientific publication. Scientists now publish their research interests, theories and outcomes across numerous channels, including personal blogs and other thematic web spaces where ideas, activities and partial results are discussed. Accordingly, information systems that facilitate access to scientific literature must learn to cope with this valuable and varied data, evolving to make this research easily discoverable and available to end users. In this paper we describe the incremental process of discovering web resources in the domain of agricultural science and technology. Making use of Linked Open Data methodologies, we interlink a wide array of custom-crawled resources with the AGRIS bibliographic database in order to enrich the user experience of the AGRIS website. We also discuss the SemaGrow Stack, a query federation and data integration infrastructure used to estimate the semantic distance between crawled web resources and AGRIS.The social media revolution is having a dramatic effect on the world of scientific publication. Scientists now publish their research interests, theories and outcomes across numerous channels, including personal blogs and other thematic web spaces where ideas, activities and partial results are discussed. Accordingly, information systems that facilitate access to scientific literature must learn to cope with this valuable and varied data, evolving to make this research easily discoverable and available to end users. In this paper we describe the incremental process of discovering web resources in the domain of agricultural science and technology. Making use of Linked Open Data methodologies, we interlink a wide array of custom-crawled resources with the AGRIS bibliographic database in order to enrich the user experience of the AGRIS website. We also discuss the SemaGrow Stack, a query federation and data integration infrastructure used to estimate the semantic distance between crawled web resources and AGRIS.

Design and Implementation of the ZH/EN Bilingual Retrieval System Based on the CAT/AGROVOC Mapping

For the users’ convenience of accessing the AGRIS resources quickly and using them fully, the paper decomposes the structure of AGRIS Search net, analyzes the users’ requirement met for conducting a bilingual (ZH/EN) retrieval, the system function extensions based on AGRIS English retrieval system and the key issues which the core function module should resolve. Derived by the application requirement, the paper also puts forward to a bilingual retrieval model on the basis of CAT/AGROVOC mapping, designs and realizes the ZH/EN bilingual retrieval prototype system.