Reusing the NCBO BioPortal technology for agronomy to build AgroPortal

Many vocabularies and ontologies are produced to represent and annotate agronomic data. By reusing the NCBO BioPortal technology, we have already designed and implemented an advanced prototype ontology repository for the agronomy domain. We plan to turn that prototype into a real service to the community. The AgroPortal project aims at reusing the scientific outcomes and experience of the biomedical domain in the context of plant, agronomic, food, environment (perhaps animal) sciences. We offer an ontology portal which features ontology hosting, search, versioning, visualization, comment, recommendation, enables semantic annotation, as well as storing and exploiting ontology alignments. All of these within a fully semantic web compliant infrastructure. The AgroPortal specifically pays attention to respect the requirements of the agronomic community in terms of ontology formats (e.g., SKOS, trait dictionaries) or supported features. In this paper, we present our prototype as well as preliminary outputs of four driving agronomic use cases. With the experience acquired in the biomedical domain and building atop of an already existing technology, we think that AgroPortal offers a robust and stable reference repository that will become highly valuable for the agronomic domain

AgroPortal: a vocabulary and ontology repository for agronomy

Many vocabularies and ontologies are produced to represent and annotate agronomic data. However, those ontologies are spread out, in different formats, of different size, with different structures and from overlapping domains. Therefore, there is need for a common platform to receive and host them, align them, and enabling their use in agro-informatics applications. By reusing the National Center for Biomedical Ontologies (NCBO) BioPortal technology, we have designed AgroPortal, an ontology repository for the agronomy domain. The AgroPortal project re-uses the biomedical domain’s semantic tools and insights to serve agronomy, but also food, plant, and biodiversity sciences. We offer a portal that features ontology hosting, search, versioning, visualization, comment, and recommendation; enables semantic annotation; stores and exploits ontology alignments; and enables interoperation with the semantic web. The AgroPortal specifically satisfies requirements of the agronomy community in terms of ontology formats (e.g., SKOS vocabularies and trait dictionaries) and supported features (offering detailed metadata and advanced annotation capabilities). In this paper, we present our platform’s content and features, including the additions to the original technology, as well as preliminary outputs of five driving agronomic use cases that participated in the design and orientation of the project to anchor it in the community. By building on the experience and existing technology acquired from the biomedical domain, we can present in AgroPortal a robust and feature-rich repository of great value for the agronomic domain. Keyword

Ontology Repositories and Semantic Artefact Catalogues with the OntoPortal Technology

Dans tous les domaines de la science, de nombreuses ontologies (ou plus largement des artefacts sémantiques 1 ) sont utilisées pour représenter et annoter les données de manière standardisée. Les artefacts sémantiques sont devenus un élément maître pour atteindre les principes FAIR en matière de données

Ontology Repositories and Semantic Artefact Catalogues with the OntoPortal Technology

Il y a une explosion dans le nombre d’ontologies et d’artefacts sémantiques. Cet article traite de la nécessité pour les plateformes communes de recevoir, héberger, servir, aligner et activer leur réutilisation. Les catalogues sont nécessaires pour répondre à ce besoin et faire des ontologies FAIR (Findable, Accessible, interopérable et réutilisable)

Improving data identification and tagging for more effective decision making in agriculture

International audienc

The evaluation of ontologies: quality, reuse and social factors

Finding a “good” or the “right” ontology is a growing challenge in the ontology domain, where one of the main aims is to share and reuse existing semantics and knowledge. Before reusing an ontology, knowledge engineers not only have to find a set of appropriate ontologies for their search query, but they should also be able to evaluate those ontologies according to different internal and external criteria. Therefore, ontology evaluation is at the heart of ontology selection and has received a considerable amount of attention in the literature.Despite the importance of ontology evaluation and selection and the widespread research on these topics, there are still many unanswered questions and challenges when it comes to evaluating and selecting ontologies for reuse. Most of the evaluation metrics and frameworks in the literature are mainly based on a limited set of internal characteristics, e.g., content and structure of ontologies and ignore how they are used and evaluated by communities. This thesis aimed to investigate the notion of quality and reusability in the ontology domain and to explore and identify the set of metrics that can affect the process of ontology evaluation and selection for reuse. [Continues.

A Model to Represent Nomenclatural and Taxonomic Information as Linked Data. Application to the French Taxonomic Register, TAXREF

International audienceTaxonomic registers are key tools to help us comprehend the diversity of nature. Publishing such registers in the Web of Data, following the standards and best practices of Linked Open Data (LOD), is a way of integrating multiple data sources into a world-scale, biological knowledge base. In this paper, we present an ongoing work aimed at the publication of TAXREF, the French national taxonomic register, on the Web of Data. Far beyond the mere translation of the TAXREF database into LOD standards, we show that the key point of this endeavor is the design of a model capable of capturing the two coexisting yet distinct realities underlying taxonomic registers, namely the nomenclature (the rules for naming biological entities) and the taxonomy (the description and characterization of these biological entities). We first analyze different modelling choices made to represent some international taxonomic registers as LOD, and we underline the issues that arise from these differences. Then, we propose a model aimed to tackle these issues. This model separates nomenclature from taxonomy, it is flexible enough to accommodate the ever-changing scientific consensus on taxonomy, and it adheres to the philosophy underpinning the Semantic Web standards. Finally, using the example of TAXREF, we show that the model enables interlinking with third-party LOD data sets, may they represent nomenclatural or taxonomic information