Context, Challenges, and Prospects for Agricultural Extension in Nigeria

Agricultural extension programs have been implemented in Nigeria by governmental and non-governmental agencies from the colonial era to the present day as a means toward bolstering economic development, rural livelihoods, food security, and trade relations. Nevertheless, funding and staffing levels in agricultural extension remain low compared to Nigeria’s farming population. With a brief review of past initiatives, current challenges, and potential opportunities, this article gives recommendations in three focus areas for maximizing the effectiveness of Nigerian agricultural extension: (1) prioritize human education over input provisioning in the definition of agricultural extension’s primary purpose; (2) aim for household food security, not solely business expansion, to ensure the inclusion of the most vulnerable farmers; and (3) foster multidirectional communication among academic researchers, extension agents, and farmers. Overall, this article argues that taking a farmer-centric educational approach to agricultural extension, rather than a farm-centric business approach, will have the most profound and sustained impact on Nigerian agricultural development

Knowledge Extraction for Art History: the Case of Vasari’s The Lives of The Artists (1568)

Knowledge Extraction (KE) techniques are used to convert unstructured information present in texts to Knowledge Graphs (KGs) which can be queried and explored. Despite their potential for cultural heritage domains, such as Art History, these techniques often encounter limitations if applied to domain-specific data. In this paper we present the main challenges that KE has to face on art-historical texts, by using as case study Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives of The Artists. This paper discusses the following NLP tasks for art-historical texts, namely entity recognition and linking, coreference resolution, time extraction, motif extraction and artwork extraction. Several strategies to annotate art-historical data for these tasks and evaluate NLP models are also proposed

Knowledge Extraction for Art History: the Case of Vasari’s The Lives of The Artists (1568)

Knowledge Extraction (KE) techniques are used to convert unstructured information present in texts to Knowledge Graphs (KGs) which can be queried and explored. Despite their potential for cultural heritage domains, such as Art History, these techniques often encounter limitations if applied to domain-specific data. In this paper we present the main challenges that KE has to face on art-historical texts, by using as case study Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of The Artists. This paper discusses the following NLP tasks for art-historical texts, namely entity recognition and linking, coreference resolution, time extraction, motif extraction and artwork extraction. Several strategies to annotate art-historical data for these tasks and evaluate NLP models are also proposed

DDB-EDM to FaBiO: The Case of the German Digital Library

Cultural heritage portals have the goal of providing users with seamless access to all their resources. This paper introduces initial efforts for a user-oriented restructuring of the German Digital Library (DDB). At present, cultural heritage objects (CHOs) in the DDB are modeled using an extended version of the Europeana Data Model (DDBEDM), which negatively impacts usability and exploration. These challenges can be addressed by leveraging ontologies, and building a knowledge graph from the DDB's voluminous collection. Towards this goal, an alignment of bibliographic metadata from DDB-EDM to FRBR-Aligned Bibliographic Ontology (FaBiO) is presented

DDB-KG: The German Bibliographic Heritage in a Knowledge Graph

Under the German government’s initiative “NEUSTART Kultur”, the German Digital Library or Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (DDB) is undergoing improvements to enhance user-experience. As an initial step, emphasis is placed on creating a knowledge graph from the bibliographic record collection of the DDB. This paper discusses the challenges facing the DDB in terms of retrieval and the solutions in addressing them. In particular, limitations of the current data model or ontology to represent bibliographic metadata is analyzed through concrete examples. This study presents the complete ontological mapping from DDB-Europeana Data Model (DDB-EDM) to FaBiO, and a prototype of the DDB-KG made available as a SPARQL endpoint. The suitabiliy of the target ontology is demonstrated with SPARQL queries formulated from competency question

Phylogenetic Signal, Root Morphology, Mycorrhizal Type, and Macroinvertebrate Exclusion: Exploring Wood Decomposition in Soils Conditioned by 13 Temperate Tree Species

Woodlands are pivotal to carbon stocks, but the process of cycling C is slow and may be most effective in the biodiverse root zone. How the root zone impacts plants has been widely examined over the past few decades, but the role of the root zone in decomposition is understudied. Here, we examined how mycorrhizal association and macroinvertebrate activity influences wood decomposition across diverse tree species. Within the root zone of six predominantly arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) (Acer negundo, Acer saccharum, Prunus serotina, Juglans nigra, Sassafras albidum, and Liriodendron tulipfera) and seven predominantly ectomycorrhizal (EM) tree species (Carya glabra, Quercus alba, Quercus rubra, Betula alleghaniensis, Picea rubens, Pinus virginiana, and Pinus strobus), woody litter was buried for 13 months. Macroinvertebrate access to woody substrate was either prevented or not using 0.22 mm mesh in a common garden site in central Pennsylvania. Decomposition was assessed as proportionate mass loss, as explained by root diameter, phylogenetic signal, mycorrhizal type, canopy tree trait, or macroinvertebrate exclusion. Macroinvertebrate exclusion significantly increased wood decomposition by 5.9%, while mycorrhizal type did not affect wood decomposition, nor did canopy traits (i.e., broad leaves versus pine needles). Interestingly, there was a phylogenetic signal for wood decomposition. Local indicators for phylogenetic associations (LIPA) determined high values of sensitivity value in Pinus and Picea genera, while Carya, Juglans, Betula, and Prunus yielded low values of sensitivity. Phylogenetic signals went undetected for tree root morphology. Despite this, roots greater than 0.35 mm significantly increased woody litter decomposition by 8%. In conclusion, the findings of this study suggest trees with larger root diameters can accelerate C cycling, as can trees associated with certain phylogenetic clades. In addition, root zone macroinvertebrates can potentially limit woody C cycling, while mycorrhizal type does not play a significant role

Multimodal Search on Iconclass using Vision-Language Pre-Trained Models

Terminology sources, such as controlled vocabularies, thesauri and classification systems, play a key role in digitizing cultural heritage. However, Information Retrieval (IR) systems that allow to query and explore these lexical resources often lack an adequate representation of the semantics behind the user's search, which can be conveyed through multiple expression modalities (e.g., images, keywords or textual descriptions). This paper presents the implementation of a new search engine for one of the most widely used iconography classification system, Iconclass. The novelty of this system is the use of a pre-trained vision-language model, namely CLIP, to retrieve and explore Iconclass concepts using visual or textual queries