Agricultural Ontology Web Services

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Agricultural Ontology Web Services

• Striving for more interoperability in
  agricultural information management

Boris Lauser Food and Agriculture Organization
of the United Nations (FAO), Rome, Italy
OASIS Symposium 2006 9 May 2006
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Overview

• FAO and its role
• Introduction to AGROVOC thesaurus
• Present situation and problems
• AGROVOC web services
• AOS and AOS Concept Server
• Outlook AOS/CS web services

AGROVOC thesaurus
Present Situation
AGROVOC web services
AOS
Agricultural ontology web services
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The role of the Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO)

• The First Article of the FAO Constitution
• The Organization shall collect, analyse,
  interpret and disseminate information relating to
  nutrition, food and agriculture.
• WAICENT World Agricultural Information Centre
• Knowledge Management
• Information Dissemination
• Collaboration with internal/external stakeholders
• Promotion of Agricultural Information Management
  Standards (AIMS)(bibliographical databases, use
  of metadata and knowledge organization systems
  (KOS) like thesauri, ontologies, etc.)

AGROVOC thesaurus
Present Situation
AGROVOC web services
AOS
Agricultural ontology web services
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What is AGROVOC?

• Multilingual Thesaurus
• Structured vocabulary to cover terminology in
  agriculture, fisheries, forestry, food and
  related domains
• Currently available in 14 languages
• about 30.000 terms
• Available online at

http//www.fao.org/aims/ag_alpha.htm.
AGROVOC thesaurus
Present Situation
AGROVOC web services
AOS
Agricultural ontology web services
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Use of AGROVOC Metadata from controlled
vocabularies
AGROVOC thesaurus
Present Situation
AGROVOC web services
AOS
Agricultural ontology web services
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Present Situation
WebAGRIS input system
local copy AGRIS center Thailand
local copy x
local copy y
local copy AGRIS center Venezuela
AGROVOC thesaurus relational database master copy
local copy AGRIS center Ukraine
.....
local copy z
local thesaurus browser z
AGROVOC thesaurus
Present Situation
AGROVOC web services
AOS
Agricultural ontology web services
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Problem
local copy AGRIS center Vietnam
request toadd new term Avian Flu
Outdated!
local copy AGRIS center Y
new term and relationshipsadded
local copy AGRIS center Z
need to create an updated export and resubmit
the physical database to each AGROVOC user
AGROVOC thesaurus
Present Situation
AGROVOC web services
AOS
Agricultural ontology web services
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Summary of Problems

• Local databases are frequently outdated (AGROVOC
  updated 3-monthly)
• Overhead for FAO to export and send new copies
  with every update / new request
• Local applications need to be customized to
  AGROVOCs specific database structure
• A new interface needs to be implemented on the
  local application level for each other thesaurus
  to be used.

AGROVOC thesaurus
Present Situation
AGROVOC web services
AOS
Agricultural ontology web services
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The solution web services
AGROVOC web services interface
SOAP WSDL
local application x
.....
java web services interface
SOAP WSDL
AGROVOC web services interface
local application y
update 1
update x
...
AGROVOC thesaurus
Present Situation
AGROVOC web services
AOS
Agricultural ontology web services
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AGROVOC web service

• Web service with 6 simple operations
• getTermcodeByTerm
• getTermByLanguage
• getAllLabelsByTermcode
• searchByTerm
• getConceptByTerm
• getDefinitions
• sufficient for the most important thesaurus
  information

http//www.fao.org/aims/ag_webservices.jsp
AGROVOC thesaurus
Present Situation
AGROVOC web services
AOS
Agricultural ontology web services
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AGROVOC web services
Eclipse Web Tools Platform
implementation using standard technologies
Apache Tomcat

• SOAP
• WSDL

AGROVOC thesaurus
Present Situation
AGROVOC web services
AOS
Agricultural ontology web services
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Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS)

• Elevate terminology services to the semantic web
• Transform AGROVOC thesaurus to AOS Concept
  Server
• Move from proprietary relational databases to
  standard formats.

OWLWeb Ontology Language
AGROVOC thesaurus
Present Situation
AGROVOC web services
AOS
Agricultural ontology web services
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Agricultural Ontology Web Services

• Outlook on possible future web services
• Retrieval of standard OWL representation of
  terminology
• Retrieval of semantically richer concepts
• Retrieval of semantically richer relationships
• Retrieval of more lexical information (synonyms,
  acronyms, spelling variants...)
• Automatic translation services
• Automatic text classification services
• Mapping services to other standard terminology
  systems.

AGROVOC thesaurus
Present Situation
AGROVOC web services
AOS
Agricultural ontology web services
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References

• Agricultural Information Management Standards
  http//www.fao.org/aims
• AGROVOC Web Serviceshttp//www.fao.org/aims/ag_we
  bservices.jsp

AGROVOC thesaurus
Present Situation
AGROVOC web services
AOS
Agricultural ontology web services
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Thanks for your attention