The CIARD RING, an infrastructure for interoperability of agricultural research information services

Creating integrated information services in agriculture giving access and adding value to information residing in distributed sources remains a major challenge. In distributed architectures, value added services by definition interface several information sources / services. Therefore value added services cannot be built without an awareness of what others have done: which sources are available, how to tap into them, how to exploit their semantics. The Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research for Development (CIARD) Routemap to Information Nodes and Gateways (RING) is a portal offering an interlinked registry of existing information services in agriculture. The CIARD RING covers both information services and sources: in nowadays information architectures, the distinction between the two is very fluid. In the RING, the definition of "service" includes any form of providing information from one server instance (website, mail server, web services, XML archive...) to many clients (browsers, email clients, news readers, harvesters...) The services registered in the RING are described in details and categorized according to criteria that are relevant to the use of the service and its interoperability. The RING categorizes and interlinks the featured services according to criteria such as: standards adopted, vocabulary used, technology used, protocols implemented, level of interoperability etc. In addition, it features detailed instructions on how the registered services can be "interoperated". The vision is that the RING will become the common global technical platform for the community of agricultural information professionals for accessing, sharing and exchanging information through web services. This paper describes how the RING provides an infrastructure for enhancing interoperability of information sources and thus paves the way towards better accessibility of information through value-added and better targeted services

Bridging End Users' Terms and AGROVOC Concept Server Vocabularies

The AGROVOC is a multilingual structured thesaurus in the agricultural domain. It has already been mapped with several vocabularies, for example AGROVOC-CAT, AGROVOC-NALT , AGROVOC-SWD. Although these vocabularies already contained a good portion of non-preferred terms, the terms are collected under the literary warrant and institutional warrant principles; which means vocabularies were collected based on the documents and publications rather than user‟s queries. It is still very common that end users would use different terms to express the same concept. In light of above discussion, we need to bridge these vocabularies and the users‟ terms Backgroun

Adaptation of DSpace to the Specific Needs of the Agricultural Sciences and Technology Community

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PostersThe aim of this project is to explore the customization of DSpace according to the use of controlled vocabularies. The plug-in shall be easy–to–install modules available free for download on the DSpace site. The objective is the adaptation of DSpace to the specific needs of the Agricultural Sciences and Technology community in order to assure quality in metadata creation. Knowledge Organization Systems such as the AGROVOC thesaurus provide mechanisms for sharing information in a standardized manner by recommending the use of common semantics.Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation

Risks in major innovation projects, a multiple case study within a world's leading company in the fast moving consumer goods

This paper investigates which risks characterise radical innovation projects. In-dept case studies were carried out via interviews and a questionnaire. The risk concept applied in this study includes three dimensions: certainty, controllability and impact. Three structural or unambiguous risks were found: new product performance according to specification, reliability of suppliers and new product adoption by consumers. The incidental or ambiguous risks that were found relate to: internal organisation and project management. These results can provide guidance for project teams and innovation managers regarding issues they must seek to tick off early and issues that continuously require team and management attention

The CIARD RING, an infrastructure for interoperability of agricultural research information services

Creating integrated information services in agriculture giving access and adding value to information residing in distributed sources remains a major challenge. In distributed architectures, value added services by definition interface several information sources / services. Therefore value added services cannot be built without an awareness of what others have done: which sources are available, how to tap into them, how to exploit their semantics. The Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research for Development (CIARD) Routemap to Information Nodes and Gateways (RING) is a portal offering an interlinked registry of existing information services in agriculture. The CIARD RING covers both information services and sources: in nowadays information architectures, the distinction between the two is very fluid. In the RING, the definition of "service" includes any form of providing information from one server instance (website, mail server, web services, XML archive...) to many clients (browsers, email clients, news readers, harvesters...) The services registered in the RING are described in details and categorized according to criteria that are relevant to the use of the service and its interoperability. The RING categorizes and interlinks the featured services according to criteria such as: standards adopted, vocabulary used, technology used, protocols implemented, level of interoperability etc. In addition, it features detailed instructions on how the registered services can be "interoperated". The vision is that the RING will become the common global technical platform for the community of agricultural information professionals for accessing, sharing and exchanging information through web services. This paper describes how the RING provides an infrastructure for enhancing interoperability of information sources and thus paves the way towards better accessibility of information through value-added and better targeted services

Structured Metadata for Direct Resource Location: A Case Study

This paper proposes that for scientific and technical information resources, a well-structured and high-quality metadata record contains enough information to find that resource on the Internet, and as a consequence, no additional human labour is needed to create or maintain any links. Research was performed by creating a control group of records from the Online Catalogue of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and searching them in various ways in Google and Metacrawler. Based on results, this method was revised and used on the larger AGRIS database. Results showed not only that the method is successful; it is also highly useful for searching citations. A user interface is suggested, and changes to current cataloguing rules are discussed

Comparing human and automatic thesaurus mapping approaches in the agricultural domain

Knowledge organization systems (KOS), like thesauri and other controlled vocabularies, are used to provide subject access to information systems across the web. Due to the heterogeneity of these systems, mapping between vocabularies becomes crucial for retrieving relevant information. However, mapping thesauri is a laborious task, and thus big efforts are being made to automate the mapping process. This paper examines two mapping approaches involving the agricultural thesaurus AGROVOC, one machine-created and one human created. We are addressing the basic question "What are the pros and cons of human and automatic mapping and how can they complement each other?" By pointing out the difficulties in specific cases or groups of cases and grouping the sample into simple and difficult types of mappings, we show the limitations of current automatic methods and come up with some basic recommendations on what approach to use when.Comment: 10 pages, Int'l Conf. on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 200

Towards Interoperability of Geopolitical Information within FAO

This paper reports ongoing work on using an ontology as a mechanism to bridge various types of country-based information systems at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. The type of geopolitical information addressed by this work includes country international classifications, country names in the five FAO languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French and Spanish), and other geographical information, such as the division of water bodies. Although the data required for the geopolitical ontology is already available, it is scattered across many information systems, which are often not clearly connected to one another. The expected advantage of using an ontology to achieve interoperability is that it can accommodate semantic relationships (between countries and geographical entities) that can be exploited for inference. Moreover, in virtue of the standardized semantically-oriented languages used to encode the ontology, it will provide a highly sharable and reusable resource for the international community. This paper describes the geopolitical information to manage, presents the requirements imposed on the ontology and gives details about the ontology prototype. Finally, it discusses design issues and draws some preliminary conclusions

Opening and Linking Agricultural Research Data

A Research Data Alliance (RDA) Interest Group has formed around a community of scientists and researchers who wish to make agricultural data, information, and knowledge more accessible. The objective of the Agricultural Data Interest Group is to get together active representatives of the major international institutions that work on agricultural research and innovation worldwide, in order to address issues related to data that are important to the development of global agriculture. The Interest Group is moving toward this goal by advancing the formation of a Wheat Data Interoperability Working Group that will address diverse data problems of 'wheat data' and, within a time period of 18 months, provide a framework for wheat data interoperability. The framework will foster the adoption of common standards and vocabularies for wheat data management, and facilitate access, discovery, reuse, and integration of that data