1. Agricultural Ontology Web Services Striving for more interoperability in agricultural information management OASIS Symposium 20069 May 2006 Boris Lauser Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Rome, Italy

2. 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 thesaurusPresent SituationAGROVOC web servicesAOSAgricultural ontology web services

3. 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 thesaurusPresent SituationAGROVOC web servicesAOSAgricultural ontology web services

4. 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 SituationAGROVOC web servicesAOSAgricultural ontology web services

5. Use of AGROVOC: Metadata from controlled vocabularies AGROVOC thesaurus Present SituationAGROVOC web servicesAOSAgricultural ontology web services

6. Present Situation AGROVOC thesaurus relational database master copy local copy AGRIS center Thailand local copy AGRIS center Venezuela local copy AGRIS center Ukraine WebAGRIS input system local copy x local copy y local copy z local thesaurus browser z..... AGROVOC thesaurus Present Situation AGROVOC web servicesAOSAgricultural ontology web services

7. Problem request to add new term “ Avian Flu ” new term and relationships added local copy AGRIS center Vietnam local copy AGRIS center Y local copy AGRIS center Z Outdated! need to create an updated export and resubmit the physical database to each AGROVOC user AGROVOC thesaurus Present Situation AGROVOC web servicesAOSAgricultural ontology web services

8. Summary of Problems Local databases are frequently outdated (AGROVOC updated 3-monthly); Overhead for FAO to export and send new copies with every update / new request; Local applications need to be customized to AGROVOC’s 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 servicesAOSAgricultural ontology web services

9. The solution: web services AGROVOCweb servicesinterface update 1update x... java web services interface SOAP WSDL local application x local application y..... AGROVOCweb servicesinterface SOAP WSDL AGROVOC thesaurusPresent Situation AGROVOC web services AOSAgricultural ontology web services

10. 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 thesaurusPresent Situation AGROVOC web services AOSAgricultural ontology web services

11. AGROVOC web services implementation using standard technologies Eclipse Web Tools Platform SOAP WSDL Apache Tomcat AGROVOC thesaurusPresent Situation AGROVOC web services AOSAgricultural ontology web services

12. OWL Web Ontology Language 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. AGROVOC thesaurusPresent SituationAGROVOC web services AOS Agricultural ontology web services

13. 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 thesaurusPresent SituationAGROVOC web servicesAOS Agricultural ontology web services

14. References Agricultural Information Management Standards http://www.fao.org/aims http://www.fao.org/aims AGROVOC Web Services http://www.fao.org/aims/ag_webservices.jsp http://www.fao.org/aims/ag_webservices.jsp AGROVOC thesaurusPresent SituationAGROVOC web servicesAOSAgricultural ontology web services

15. Thanks for your attention