Agricultural Ontology Web ServicesAgricultural Ontology Web Services
Striving for more interoperability in agricultural information management
OASIS Symposium 2006 9 May 2006
Boris Lauser Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Rome, Italy
OverviewOverview
• 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 thesaurus Present Situation AGROVOC web services AOS Agricultural ontology web services
The role of the The role of the Food and Agriculture OrganizationFood and Agriculture Organization (FAO) (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 thesaurus Present Situation AGROVOC web services AOS Agricultural ontology web services
What is AGROVOC?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 Situation AGROVOC web services AOS Agricultural ontology web services
Use of AGROVOC: Metadata from controlled Use of AGROVOC: Metadata from controlled vocabulariesvocabularies
AGROVOC thesaurus Present Situation AGROVOC web services AOS Agricultural ontology web services
Present SituationPresent Situation
AGROVOC thesaurusrelational database
master copy
local copyAGRIS center
Thailand
local copyAGRIS center
Venezuela
local copyAGRIS center
Ukraine
WebAGRISinput system
local copy x
local copy y
local copy z local thesaurusbrowser z
.....
AGROVOC thesaurus Present Situation AGROVOC web services AOS Agricultural ontology web services
ProblemProblem
request toadd new term“Avian Flu”
new term and relationships
added
local copyAGRIS center
Vietnam
local copyAGRIS center
Y
local copyAGRIS center
Z
Outdated!
need to create an updated export and resubmit the physical database to each AGROVOC user
AGROVOC thesaurus Present Situation AGROVOC web services AOS Agricultural ontology web services
Summary of ProblemsSummary 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 services AOS Agricultural ontology web services
The solution: web servicesThe solution: web services
AG
RO
VO
Cw
eb servicesinterface
update 1 update x...
java web services interface
SOAPWSDL
local application x
local application y
.....
AG
RO
VO
Cw
eb servicesinterface
SOAPWSDL
AGROVOC thesaurus Present Situation AGROVOC web services AOS Agricultural ontology web services
AGROVOC web serviceAGROVOC 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 thesaurus Present Situation AGROVOC web services AOS Agricultural ontology web services
AGROVOC web servicesAGROVOC web services
implementationusing standardtechnologies
Eclipse Web Tools Platform
• SOAP• WSDL
Apache Tomcat
AGROVOC thesaurus Present Situation AGROVOC web services AOS Agricultural ontology web services
OWLWeb Ontology Language
Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS)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 thesaurus Present Situation AGROVOC web services AOS Agricultural ontology web services
Agricultural Ontology Web ServicesAgricultural 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 thesaurus Present Situation AGROVOC web services AOS Agricultural ontology web services
ReferencesReferences
• Agricultural Information Management Standards http://www.fao.org/aims
• AGROVOC Web Serviceshttp://www.fao.org/aims/ag_webservices.jsp
AGROVOC thesaurus Present Situation AGROVOC web services AOS Agricultural ontology web services