Margherita Sini

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations | FAO · Chief Information Officer Division (CIO)

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is recognized as an information and knowledge-base organization. FAO's activities comprise four main areas which are closely related to various aspects of information and knowledge: capture and analyze, disseminate and share, localize and provide. The goal of developing and maintaini...

The tendency of representing information in a form that could be better elaborated by computers (the so called "machine readable format") (Berners-Lee 1998) initiated years ago, expanded to many domains, among which agriculture. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, The Kasetsart University and the Indian Institute of Technol...

This paper describes the "food task" of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) 2006 and 2007. The OAEI** is a comparative evaluation effort to measure the quality of automatic ontology-alignment systems. The food task focuses on the alignment of thesauri in the agricultural domain. It aims at providing a realistic task for ontology-ali...

A vocabulary stores words, synonyms, word sense definitions (i.e. glosses), relations between word senses and concepts; such a vocabulary is generally referred to as the Controlled Vocabulary (CV) if choice or selections of terms are done by domain specialists. A facet is a distinct and dimensional feature of a concept or a term that allows taxonom...

In this paper we report on ongoing work concerning the creation of a network of ontologies based on metadata for time series relative to the domain of fisheries, and hint at the possibility of exploiting the network for web service applications. The results obtained so far show that the reengineering of classification systems stored as relational...

A vocabulary stores words, synonyms, word sense definitions (i.e. glosses), relations between word senses and concepts; such a vocabulary is generally referred to as the Controlled Vocabulary if choice or selections of terms are done by domain specialists. In our case, we create and match two controlled vocabularies by using their concept facet. Th...

Ontology plays an important role in the enhancement performance of systems, addressing issues such as knowledge sharing, knowledge aggregation as well as information retrieval and question answering. This paper presents the AGROVOC Concept Server Workbench (ACSW) for multilingual ontological concept construction and maintenance. The ACSW is a web 2...

An ontological knowledge management system requires dynamic and encapsulating operation in order to share knowledge among communities. The key to success of knowledge sharing in the field of agriculture is using and sharing agreed terminologies such as ontological knowledge especially in multiple languages. This paper proposes a workbench with thre...

Purpose The 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. Des...

AGROVOC is a Multilingual Agricultural Thesaurus developed by FAO. It is an agricultural thesaurus in its broadest sense, covering not only agriculture but also fisheries, forestry, human nutrition, environment, and relevant terminology in the supporting biological, physical, and social sciences. AGROVOC was basically "born" in English, or at least...

The semantic heterogeneity of Web information in the Agricultural domain presents tremendous information retrieval challenges. This article presents work taking place at the Food and Agriculture Organizations (FAO) that addresses this challenge. Based on the analysis of resources in the domain of agriculture, this paper proposes (a) an application...

International organizations like FAO are intrinsically multilingual. FAO is currently experimenting with semantic-oriented technologies based on ontologies, with the purpose of integrating data across various information systems and providing better services to end users. However, in order for these technologies to be used in real-life scenarios, m...

This paper describes the work done within the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on providing an ontology-based navigation for the Food, Nutrition and Agriculture (FNA) Journal. The aim of the revised navigation was to provide more efficient and effective browsing of the Food and Nutrition Publications using a knowledge m...

The Food and Agriculture Organization is developing an underlying model for a new knowledge organization system, the Agricultural Ontology Service Concept Server (AOS/CS), using the Web Ontology Language OWL. In this paper, we describe the purpose of the conversion of the AGROVOC thesaurus to this new system, and highlight in particular the core fe...

This paper describes the procedures for a concept-based mapping of two agricultural thesauri, the multilingual AGROVOC, created and maintained by the Food and Agricultural Organization, and the bilingual Chinese Agricultural Thesaurus, created and maintained by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science. Conducted under the auspices of FAO's Agric...

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...

This paper introduces the criteria and the procedures for mapping the Chinese Agricultural Thesaurus (CAT) to FAO's multilingual agricultural thesaurus AGROVOC. It proposes modifications to the inter-thesaurus mapping rules provided in the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) specification. It outlines in detail the criteria for the applicat...

AGROVOC is a multilingual thesaurus developed and maintained by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. Like all thesauri, it contains some explicit semantics, which allow it to be transformed into an ontology or used as a resource for ontology construction. However, most thesauri, AGROVOC included, give very broad relationshi...

Ontology creation and document indexing are well-known, critical bottlenecks for integrating semantic services and in general for bootstrapping the Semantic Web. For certain domains or communities, legacy terminologies and indexing methods exist which can be reused effectively. In the Fishery Ontology Project (FOS), we have reengineered and aligned...

This deliverable aims at the provision of multilingual support for ontology development in terms of representation of multilingual information. The main contributions included in this document are: an overview of methods, techniques and tools used for the localizing process of some lexical and ontological resources; an analysis of the different wa...

This deliverable presents the first version of the NeOn methodology for the development of largescale semantic applications. The methodology will help application developers to build semantic applications from scratch or to include semantic components into traditional information systems. The deliverable presents a characterization of large-scale s...

This paper describes a multilingual semantic search assistant (MSSA) that could help users find proper keywords in FAO fulltext-based search engines. The MSSA implements four independent functions each associated with the AGROVOC multilingual thesaurus to assist users in choosing better keywords: a Venn diagram-based Boolean search interface, an an...

The Global Forest Information Service (GFIS) arises from calls by the intergovernmental forest processes (IPF, IFF and UNFF) to facilitate access to forest information and the multiple benefits thereof. GFIS is being facilitated by a IUFRO Task Force that has a broad and increasing membership from across all geographic regions. GFIS is envisaged pr...

This paper refers to the creation of multilingual agricultural knowledge models (KMs) in the context of the Agropedia Indica project. We present the reasons and the requirements for the development of such KMs, the choices made in terms of modeling tools and modeling solutions, and we detail the content of some of the models.