1. Thai AGROVOC Ontology Base for Agricultural Information Retrieval
Aree Thunkijjanukij
Thai National AGRIS Centre
Kasetsart University, Bangkok Thailand
Fifth Agricultural Ontology Workshop
27-29 April 2004

2. Presentation Outline Introducing Thai Agris Centre Present Obstacles
Strategies and Solution for improvement
Anticipated Outcomes
How was the AGROVOC developed?
Utilization and Demonstration
Conclusion

3. Introducing Thai National AGRIS Centre
Thai National AGRIS Centre is the centre for agricultural information at the national level. It was established in 1980 and has been operating within the network of AGRIS-International Information System for the Agricultural Sciences and Technology for more than 24 years.

4. The Centre’s Missions To be Thai Agricultural Knowledge Centre
To collect and produce agricultural information
To create Thailand Agricultural Database
To coordinate and partner with AGRIS/FAO
To provide international agricultural information service
To establish agricultural information network within the country
To encourage the development of agricultural information system in Thailand

5. Present obstacles Linguistic phenomena Lexicon coverage
Same form but different meaning
No words segmentation
การสัมมนาเชิงปฏิบัติการเรื่องออนโทโลยีเซอร์วิสด้านการเกษตร ครั้งที่ 5
Fifth Agricultural Ontology Service Workshop
Lexicon coverage
Technical terms and Name Entities
Hard to maintain

6. Present obstacles (cont.)
Indexing in English is not efficient and erroneous
Data retrieving deficiency (the retrieved document do not match the need of users)
Language barrier

7. Strategies for improvement
Increase indexing efficiency
Create standard words for making index in Thai
Automatic assigned English descriptor
Increase retrieval efficiency
Allow comprehensive and fast data retrieval
Multilingual document retrieval

8. Higher Quality of Knowledge repository
Contributions of Thai AGROVOC ontology to the improvement of knowledge management
Higher Quality of Knowledge repository
Knowledge base for intelligent retrieval system
Automatic knowledge summarization and machine translation

9. Thai AGROVOC Development
Project financial support from Kasetsart University Research and Development Institute and technical support from FAO.
Two phases implementation, developing Thai AGROVOC and adding words in local language and maintenance.

13. Thai AGROVOC 1st edition (http://pikul.lib.ku.ac.th/)

15. Thai AGROVOC for indexing

16. Thai AGROVOC for retrieval

17. Thai AGROVOC for Intelligent search

39. Capacity building: the collaboration with computer engineering research unit, NaiST Laboratory
Reduce cost and increase performance, Creating ontology base is very time and cost consuming. The endeavor has to utilize countless experts in many fields, in addition to a lot of personnel for data recording and processing.
Maintenance thesaurus in terms of adding word and create hierarchical relation is extremely difficult due to lack of efficient tool.