PurposeThe 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/approachThe CS offers a centralised facility where the agricultural information management community can build and share agricultural knowledge in a collaborative environment.FindingsThe 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/implicationsFurther 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).Practical implicationsThe CS serves as starting point for the development of specific domain ontologies where multilinguality and the localised representation of knowledge are essential issues. Furthermore, it will offer additional services in order to expose the knowledge to be consumed by other applications.Originality/valueThe CS Workbench provides the AGROVOC partners with the possibility to directly and collaboratively edit the AGROVOC CS. It thus provides the opportunity for direct and open “many‐to‐many” communication links between communities, avoiding decentralised communication between partners and duplication of effort. For the international community, it may allow users to manage, re‐use or extend agriculture‐related knowledge for better interoperability and for improved services.

Over the past few years, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has been working on the development of semantic standards in metadata and controlled vocabularies in the agricultural domain. At present, there are a number of parallel and dispersed developments in standards, tools and systems for managing agricultural information. The First Consultation on Agricultural Information Management (COAIM), held in 2000, recommended that FAO assume a leading role as a clearinghouse for internationally used information management standards in the agricultural sector.

Knowledge organization systems (KOS), like thesauri and other controlled vocabularies, are used to provide subject access to information systems across the web. Due to the heterogeneity of these systems, mapping between vocabularies becomes crucial for retrieving relevant information. However, mapping thesauri is a laborious task, and thus big efforts are being made to automate the mapping process. This paper examines two mapping approaches involving the agricultural thesaurus AGROVOC, one machine-created and one human created. We are addressing the basic question "What are the pros and cons of human and automatic mapping and how can they complement each other?" By pointing out the difficulties in specific cases or groups of cases and grouping the sample into simple and difficult types of mappings, we show the limitations of current automatic methods and come up with some basic recommendations on what approach to use when.

Controlled vocabularies, such as the multilingual agricultural thesaurus AGROVOC, are the facilitators of semantic services on the Internet, since they can provide the baseline for connecting distributed resources. The more resources in a particular domain are described using a certain controlled vocabulary, the more accessible and interoperable they will be. Providers of controlled vocabularies traditionally distribute their complete databases upon request to system developers in order to incorporate them into information systems. This process is cumbersome, and creates duplication of work, since common vocabulary and terminology services (like a query for a related term) have to be redone each time at the local application level. With web services it is now possible to expose such common vocabulary services openly on the Internet, thus avoiding laborious local duplication and ultimately encouraging a wider audience to use these services.

This paper illustrates the conversion from a traditional thesaurus in agriculture (AGROVOC) to a new system, the Agricultural Ontology Service Concept Server (AOS/CS). The Concept Server will serve as a multilingual repository of concepts in the agricultural domain providing ontological relationships and a rich, semantically sound terminology. The Food and Agriculture Organization recently developed the underlying model for this new system in the Web ontology language OWL. In this paper, we describe the purpose of this conversion and the use of OWL and highlight in particular the core features of the developed OWL model. We go on to explain how it evolves and differs from the traditional thesaurus approach.

This paper illustrates the conversion from a traditional thesaurus in agriculture (AGROVOC) to a new system, the Agricultural Ontology Service Concept Server (AOS/CS). The Concept Server will serve as a multilingual repository of concepts in the agricultural domain providing ontological relationships and a rich, semantically sound terminology. The Food and Agriculture Organization recently developed the underlying model for this new system in the Web ontology language OWL. In this paper, we describe the purpose of this conversion and the use of OWL and highlight in particular the core features of the developed OWL model. We go on to explain how it evolves and differs from the traditional thesaurus approach.

Existing classification schemes and thesauri are lacking in well-defined semantics and structural consistency. Empowering end users in searching collections of ever increasing magnitudes with performance far exceeding plain free-text searching (as used in many Web search engines), and developing systems that not only find but also process information for action, requires far more powerful and complex knowledge organization systems (KOSs). The paper presents a conceptual structure and transition procedure to support the shift from a traditional KOS towards a full-fledged and semantically rich KOS. The proposed structure also complies with other interoperability approaches like RDFS and XML in the Web environment. AGROVOC, a traditional thesaurus developed and maintained by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, serves as a case study for exploring the reengineering of a traditional thesaurus into a fully-fledged ontology. We start the process of developing an inventory of specific relationship types with well-defined semantics for the agricultural domain and explore the rules-as-you-go approach to streamlining the reengineering process.

This short case study will show on the basis of a simple example taken from the Food Safety area, how ontologies differ from thesauri. The example will start with showing an extract from the AGROVOC1 thesaurus and exploring the information that can be extracted from here. We will then develop this example further in order to show growing functionality and expressive power first in RDFS and finally in OWL ontologies.

ion provides robustness against changes in the document. In the above example, the document representation might change using the term ‘Agricultural Agreement’ instead of ‘Agreement on Agriculture’. However, since the document has been annotated with the ontological semantics, this will not affect the search results. Second, since the ontology used

We present a novel approach of extracting a domain ontology from large-scale thesauri. Concepts are identified to be relevant for a domain based on their frequent occurrence in domain texts. The approach allows to bootstrap the ontology engineering process from given legacy thesauri and identifies an initial domain ontology that may easily be refined by experts in a later stage. We present a thorough evaluation of the results obtained in building a biosecurity ontology for the UN FAO AOS project.

This paper presents an approach to automatically subject index full-text documents with multiple labels based on binary support vector machines (SVM). The aim was to test the applicability of SVMs with a real world dataset. We have also explored the feasibility of incorporating multilingual background knowledge, as represented in thesauri or ontologies, into our text document representation for indexing purposes. The test set for our evaluations has been compiled from an extensive document base maintained by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN). Empirical results show that SVMs are a good method for automatic multi- label classification of documents in multiple languages.

In order to provide thematic access to the large scale web site of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), we have adapted a scheme used in bibliographical databases to allow subject browsing on FAO's web site. This requires categorizing existing database records across the organizations web sites into the new scheme. An algorithm to automatically categorize these metadata records based on their subject descriptors has been devised.

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.

General Comments In databases such as AGRIS, there is large quantity of metadata records, dating back several decades. Most of these records do not have full-text documents available in the originating repositories. However, it has been shown by a paper published in the Dublin Core Conference in 2003 that there is an effort to put resources on the Internet retrospectively. This paper proposes that for scientific and technical information resources, a well-structured and high-quality metadata record contains enough information to find that resource on the Internet, and as a consequence, no additional human labour is needed to create or maintain any links to full-text.