Presentation given by Johannes Keizer at the UNBIS team of UN Secretariat in New York

1. AGROVOC -FAO’s multilingual thesaurusas a building block for linked open data Gudrun JOHANNSEN1,Ahsan MORSHED1, SachitRAJBHANDARI1, Armando Stellato 3 ,Thomas Baker2 ,MargheritaSINI1 and Johannes KEIZER1 1FAO of the UN, Italy; 2WC3-SKOS working group, 3Universitá di Roma “Tor Vergata”

2. Do we need Thesauri? Yes!And Why:

4. Thesauri were based on “terms”, but terms represented already concepts in a non explicit way

5. Hierarchical and associative relationships represented generic ontological domain knowledge

6. Candidate building blocks for the semantic webThesauri in the past and now

7. The Linked Data Universe: http://www.linkeddata.org 4

9. Like the web of hypertext, the web of data is constructed with documents on the web. However, unlike the web of hypertext, where links are relationships anchors in hypertext documents written in HTML, for data they links between arbitrary things described by RDF,. The URIs identify any kind of object or concept. But for HTML or RDF, the same expectations apply to make the web grow:

10. Use URIs as names for things

11. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names.

12. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information, using the standards (RDF*, SPARQL)

13. Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things.

14. Simple. In fact, though, a surprising amount of data isn't linked in 2006, because of problems with one or more of the steps. This article discusses solutions to these problems, details of implementation, and factors affecting choices about how you publish your data. http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html

17. Finding things related to “genes” across databases Source: Joanne Luciano, Mitre, and the W3C HCLS IG

19. Standard Vocabularies can become the glue between different data sets

20. (everything linked through http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc?c_2367#concept)

22. Using Agrovoc as a controlled vocabulary

23. Structured RDF files that can be used to link data

24. Developed by IIT Kanpur for AgroPediaIndica

25. Prototype under testing with excellent resultsAgroTagger

26. http://agropedia.iitk.ac.in/auto_tagger/callable_auto_tagger.php

27. AGROVOC: From a traditional thesaurus to an Agricultural Concept Scheme A long and Winding Road

28. ..from thesaurus to Ontologies….

30. There was no standard model outside, we were on our own

31. We discussed three years the model to which we wanted to convert AGROVOC……but in the meantime AGROVOC was used and translated into 20 languages AGROVOC since 2004

32. Semantic Relationships

33. The AGROVOC OWL model

34. More Semantics MAIZE UF corn NT flint maize NT popcorn NT sweet corn MILK NT Milk Fat NT Colostrum NT Cow Milk International Fund for Agricultural Development UF IFAD MAIZE synonym corn superclass-of flint maize used-to-make popcorn hybridized-into sweet corn MILK ingredient Milk Fat ingredientColostrum superclass-of Cow Milk International Fund for Agricultural Development acronym IFAD

36. 600000 labels in around 20 languages.

37. one-stop shop for terminological knowledge related to agriculture in general

38. a knowledge base of related concepts organized in ontological relationships (hierarchical, associative, equivalence)‏

39. Is a concept/term/string based system

40. Concepts may be organized in multiple categories.AGROVOC today

42. Ontological over commitment in many class/subclass hierarchies

43. Unnecessary complications through concept /term/string hierarchy

44. Our push of AGROVOC to the Semantic Web had enormous positive effects, among others

45. From 4 to 20 language versions

46. Defacto standard for indexing in many areas

47. More than 2000 downloads only in 2009

48. SKOS incorporated all our requirementsEvaluation of the Process

49. http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/

50. The AGROVOC SKOS Model AgrovocConceptScheme SKOSConcept Scheme rdf:type skos:topConceptOf skos:inScheme 6211 rdf:type skos:broader SKOSConcept rdf:type 8171 skos:broader rdf:type rdf:type 1474 skos:broader “corn” 12332 skosxl:literalForm skosxl:prefLabel rdf:type :foo SKOS Label rdf:type skosxl:altLabel :bar “maize” skosxl:literalForm

51. Ex:FAO Ex:FAO Skosxl:altLabel skosxl:prefLabel skos:prefLabel skos:altLabel Ex: full form Skos: Label FAO Full FAO@en Food and Agricultural Organization@en Skosxl: Label FAO abrev Ex: acronym form skosxl: literalForm skosxl: literalForm FAO@en Food and Agricultural Organization@en Ex: SKOS presentation Ex: SKOS-XL presentation SKOS and SKOS-XL presentation

52. SKOS-XL output <rdf:Descriptionrdf:about="http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/agrovocScheme"> <rdf:typerdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#ConceptScheme"/></rdf:Description><rdf:Description rdf:about="http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_330829"> <rdf:typerdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#Concept"/> <skos:inSchemerdf:resource="http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/agrovocScheme"/> <skos:topConceptOfrdf:resource="http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/agrovocScheme"/></rdf:Description><rdf:Description rdf:about="http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/xl_en_1278479064610"> <literalForm xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2008/05/skos-xl#" xml:lang="en">subjects</literalForm> <rdf:typerdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/2008/05/skos-xl#Label"/></rdf:Description>

54. SKOS-XL presentation needs to apply the relationship between lexical units so that it can be understood clearly. This property is compared with OWL inverse property.

55. SKOS-XL , with the need to define labels as resources, as with concepts, schemes and collections. This defines a special type of lexical entity which is assigned a literal chain which can be repeated for various units. So, the prefLabel and altLabel can be distinguished easily in the multi-lingual thesauri .

58. Facilitate the collaborative editing of multilingual terminology and semantic concept information

59. It includes administration and group management features

60. It includes workflows for maintenance, validation and quality assurance of the data pool

61. The CS is accessible freely to everybody to facilitates collaborative editing The workbench

62. Architecture of the System

63. Concept/Term Management

65. URL will point to the image which will open in an external

66. Provide the source of the image

68. Add translation in different languages

69. Provide the source of the definition

71. AGROVOC Web Services

73. At the moment a patch to version 1.0 of the workbench is developed to make it possible to export AGROVOC SKOS

74. AGROVOC SKOS will be published as linked data.

77. UNBIS thesaurus covers a broad range of international policy and development issues

78. AGROVOC very specialized, but they do overlap partly

79. Steps:

80. Promoting together UNBIS Thesaurus and AGROVOC

81. Mapping Project?Possible collaboration

82. …and more: http://aims.fao.org

83. Thank You!