APAN AG-WG Bangkok Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN Library and Documentation Systems Division Margherita Sini Slide Sustainable tools, advanced technology, capacity building: ways to bridge the rural digital divide APAN workshop AG-WG session Bangkok, January 2005

APAN AG-WG Bangkok Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN Library and Documentation Systems Division Margherita Sini Slide Outline  The AGRIS network and tools  The Food, Nutrition and Agriculture ontology-based portal  The FAO Information Management Resource Kit (IMARK)

APAN AG-WG Bangkok Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN Library and Documentation Systems Division Margherita Sini Slide The AGRIS network and tools

APAN AG-WG Bangkok Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN Library and Documentation Systems Division Margherita Sini Slide The AGRIS network Collaborative network of institutions (subject and geographical distributed). Aims: collection, processing and dissemination of agricultural information. Based on common standards and tools. International initiative (from 1975, formally 241 participating centres). Input centres contribute: –in a centralized way (data to FAO); –act as focal points for a more decentralized system (60 centres have their own website, publishing their bibliographical databases on the web).

APAN AG-WG Bangkok Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN Library and Documentation Systems Division Margherita Sini Slide The tools: WebAGRIS WebAGRIS is a complete, multilingual Web-based system for data input, processing and dissemination (through the Internet or CD-Rom), of agricultural bibliographic information. WebAGRIS also allows for referencing to documents in electronic format. It is based on common standards of data input and dissemination formats (XML, HTML, ISO), as well as subject categorization schema and thesauri, i.e. AGROVOC.

APAN AG-WG Bangkok Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN Library and Documentation Systems Division Margherita Sini Slide WebAGRIS (cont.) WebAGRIS can be used either as: –a local application or –in a joint collection of information (through exporting, harvesting data, etc.). Each AGRIS network participating center can choose to host a Web site for inputting, searching and/or sending data to the central AGRIS database for publishing on CD-Rom. WebAGRIS improves accessibility of information generally, through the use of multi-database or multihost searching and harvesting.

APAN AG-WG Bangkok Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN Library and Documentation Systems Division Margherita Sini Slide Other resources Multilingual Agricultural Thesaurus AGRIS/CARIS Classification Scheme

APAN AG-WG Bangkok Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN Library and Documentation Systems Division Margherita Sini Slide References

APAN AG-WG Bangkok Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN Library and Documentation Systems Division Margherita Sini Slide Food, nutrition and Agriculture Ontology-based Portal

APAN AG-WG Bangkok Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN Library and Documentation Systems Division Margherita Sini Slide What it is? A web site to realize an ontology-based navigation of bibliographic data sets (the Food, Nutrition and Agriculture Journal). The system uses a simple knowledge model to guide the user's search and browse experience: –browse by keywords, categories, authors, etc. –traverse resources and properties through the ontological relationships connecting them.

APAN AG-WG Bangkok Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN Library and Documentation Systems Division Margherita Sini Slide The bibliographical metadata ontology The ontology is composed of: concepts relationships between concepts instances FAOBIBDOCREP Merge + Transform

APAN AG-WG Bangkok Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN Library and Documentation Systems Division Margherita Sini Slide What is possible to do? Easy navigation of the objects by following the semantic links Multilingual concept resolution

APAN AG-WG Bangkok Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN Library and Documentation Systems Division Margherita Sini Slide What is possible to do? Get suggestions for the navigation (e.g. synonyms) :

APAN AG-WG Bangkok Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN Library and Documentation Systems Division Margherita Sini Slide What is possible to do? Improve browsing: –e.g. continent / regions / countries –e.g. link Agris/Caris categories with keywords Perform some inference: –get the authors associated with specific keywords or vice versa (e.g. “what an author wrote about between two years”, “who wrote about famine in 1999”, etc.) –get the co-authors –show articles with a related set of keywords

APAN AG-WG Bangkok Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN Library and Documentation Systems Division Margherita Sini Slide What is possible to do? Guided query formulation Improve searching: –concept identification through natural language processing: spell checking, parsing ( e.g. “Dietary guidelines for human nutrition” or “Anaemia in children ”)

APAN AG-WG Bangkok Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN Library and Documentation Systems Division Margherita Sini Slide Reference

APAN AG-WG Bangkok Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN Library and Documentation Systems Division Margherita Sini Slide The FAO Information Management Resource Kit (IMARK)

APAN AG-WG Bangkok Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN Library and Documentation Systems Division Margherita Sini Slide IMARK It’s modular E-learning instructional methods Story-telling and Mini-cases Simulation Demonstration-practice method Interactions: tests and exercises with personalized feedback Learners can create their own personal learning path based on their interests and needs Each module includes public domain applications and tools for information management