The Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS)

A Tool for Facilitating Access to Knowledge

AGRIS/CARIS and Documentation Group

Library and Documentation Systems Division

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

• The Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS) is designed to serve as a reference tool that structures and standardises agricultural terminology in multiple languages for use by any number of different systems.

• It will provide modules of terms, definitions and relationships that can be shared among knowledge organization systems (KOSs) -- thesauri, glossaries, subject heading lists, taxonomies,...

• These modules will become the “building blocks” for re-developing and maintaining these systems as ontologies.

• It will serve a common set of core terms and relationships, as well as the richer relationships that designate it as an ontology.

Definition of the AOS

What is an ontology?

• An ontology is a system that contains terms, the definitions of those terms, and the specification of multiple, rich relationships among those terms.

• It can be thought of as an enhanced thesaurus -- it provides all the basic relationships inherent in a thesaurus, plus it defines and enables the creation of more formal and more specific relationships.

• Some examples of new relationships that could be introduced in the AOS.

The purpose of the AOS

• The AOS serves the following purposes: increasing the efficiency and consistency of describing and relating

multilingual agricultural resources decreasing the random nature and increasing the functionality for

accessing these resources enabling sharing of common descriptions, definitions and relations

within the agricultural community

• Thereby aiding in: better human and machine indexing of resources, better retrieval of resources improved architecture of websites increased interaction within the agricultural community.

The purpose of the AOS

• The backbone of the AOS is its ability to convey the context of the information to any user for indexing and retrieval purposes.

• Terms and the relationships among them define the context of those elements -- we call this defining the SEMANTICS, or the meaning inherent among the elements.

• We need to formalize this meaning through the creation of specific relationships among terms in an ontology, that both a human and a machine can understand.

An illustration of functionality

The relationship between the AOS and KOSs

Using the AOS

Proposal• The AOS should provide an avenue for effective resource

description and retrieval, and efficient knowledge system development and integration. The AOS would:

1. Create a federation of information providers in the agricultural community with defined responsibilities and roles

2. Utilise and propagate current and developing state-of-the-art interoperability standards.

3. Develop common methodologies for the creation of formal ontological relationships among topics.

4. Give a reference system to all stakeholders and others for knowledge organization and representation

Next Steps

1. Experiments with Ontologies in specific areas

2. Expert workshop with interested participants (14.15.11.)

3. Definition of participants

4. Common project paper and plan.

5. Strategy for getting funding

The role of the ontology service in the vision of the Semantic Web

Applications using RDF

or XTM

Applications using RDF

or XTM

Semantic Web

Semantic Web

Powerful Semantic

Query Engine

Powerful Semantic

Query Engine

OntologiesOntologies

Humans do better here

Computers do better here