The AGROVOC Concept Scheme : A Walkthrough

The Food and Agriculture Organization is developing a concept based multilingual vocabulary management tool to manage thesauri, authority lists and glossaries expressed as concept schemes ready to be used in a linked data environment. In this paper, we described the evolution of the AGROVOC thesaurus to AGROVOC Concept Scheme based on OWL (web ontology language) model and now shifting to SKOS (simple knowledge organization system) model. The paper explained why and how it evolved highlighting the key differences between different models. The system architecture and significant set of features available in the VocBench was discussed in the paper

The AGROVOC Concept Server Workbench System: Empowering management of agricultural vocabularies with semantics

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is recognized as an information and knowledge-base organization. FAO's activities comprise four main areas which are closely related to various aspects of information and knowledge: capture and analyze, disseminate and share, localize and provide. The goal of developing and maintaining tools for information and knowledge management is attributed to the Office of Knowledge Exchange, Research and Extension (OEK) of FAO. One of the most important resources for covering the terminology of all subject fields in agriculture domain is the AGROVOC thesaurus, which evolved into a semantic system in order to provide ontology services. This newly reengineered system is called the “AGROVOC Concept Server Workbench (ACSW)”. This article analyzes the different knowledge productions modes for the traditional AGROVOC and the new ACSW system: mode I assimilate to the traditional AGROVOC Thesaurus management and mode II to the ACSW system

Smart organization of agricultural knowledge : the example of the AGROVOC Concept Server and Agropedia

The tendency of representing information in a form that could be better elaborated by computers (the so called “machine readable format”) (Berners-Lee 1998) initiated years ago, expanded to many domains, among which Agriculture. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, The Kasetsart University and the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur are pioneers in the representation of information and knowledge related to this domain using modern techniques such as ontology languages. This paper analyzes a couple of projects developed by these organizations, aiming to make use of a concept-oriented approach while describing agricultural topics. It is organized in two chapters each referred to each project, describing in particular the innovative aspects, the benefits, and the technology used

The AGROVOC Concept Server Workbench: A collaborative tool for managing multilingual knowledge

Ontology plays an important role in the enhancement performance of systems, addressing issues such as knowledge sharing, knowledge aggregation as well as information retrieval and question answering. This paper presents the AGROVOC Concept Server Workbench (ACSW) for multilingual ontological concept construction and maintenance. The ACSW is a web 2.0 based application consisting of two main functionalities that are user management and ontological knowledge management (i.e. concept, scheme, relationship, export, search, validate and consistency check) in order to maintain the knowledge acquisition life-cycle in food and agriculture domain. Knowledge is stored in the form of multilingual concept hierarchy and also kept in the OWL format in order to exchange between machines and to do reasoning. This workbench uses Protégé API as an OWL framework. Moreover the Ontology Game conceptual framework is also presented in order to acquire ontology terms more pleasant

Publishing Australian Marine Data to OBIS: Twenty Years of Lessons Learnt

In 2003, the Australian Antarctic Data Centre published the first Australian dataset of seabirds from the Southern Ocean to OBIS (Ocean Biodiversity Information System) via DiGIR (Distributed Generic Information Retrieval). The dataset initially had 17 fields with an emphasis on counts of individuals. Standards evolved and with the development of the IPT (Integrated Publishing Toolkit) by GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) around 2008, large datasets could be published. OBIS subsequently adopted the IPT as the preferred publishing tool for providers to use. In 2016, the Darwin Core Event core with the  OBIS Extended Measurements and Facts extension was released (De Pooter et al. 2017), meaning that richer and more comprehensive datasets could be published via the IPT. It is only recently that the biological aggregators (e.g.,  OBIS, GBIF) are looking at enhancing functionality to report this data.The Australian OBIS Node (OBIS-AU), hosted by CSIRO NCMI (the Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organisation National Collections and Marine Infrastructure Business Unit) now manages an Australian region marine biodiversity IPT with 30 million records from over 450 datasets. In the last 12 months, using the GBIF DNA Derived Data Extention, the OBIS-AU Node has published extensive eDNA datasets to OBIS with sequences and DNA related metadata.OBIS-AU has developed tools and procedures to ensure that data is of the best possible quality before it is published. Issues covered include preventing the duplication of data, preserving context, enhancing data once published with improvements in publication schemas, matching taxa, and identification of temporal or spatial errors

A Collaborative framework for managing and publishing KOS

Abstract. In the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the need to revamp its popular agriculture vocabulary AGROVOC using Semantic Web knowledge representation standards combined with the need to provide a collaborative environment for development and maintenance purposes, pushed forward the realization of a dedicated AGROVOC thesaurus maintenance tool. With the progressive standardization of the AGROVOC knowledge model, following recent Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) recommendations by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and with the addition of more FAO-maintained vocabularies, the former “AGROVOC Concept Server Workbench” has become a general-purpose framework for thesauri and vocabulary development and is now reborn as “ VocBench”. In this paper, we describe the path which led to its realization and its main feature

An Australian Model of Cooperative Data Publishing to OBIS and GBIF

The Australian Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) hosts both the Australian Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS) and Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) nodes within the National Collections and Marine Infrastructure (NCMI) business unit. OBIS-AU is led by the NCMI Information and Data Centre and publishes marine biodiversity data in the Darwin Core (DwC) standard via an Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT), with over 450 marine datasets at present. The Australian GBIF node is hosted by a separate team at the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), a national-scale biodiversity analytical and knowledge delivery portal. The ALA aggregates and publishes over 800 terrestrial and marine datasets from a wide variety of research institutes, museums and collections, governments and citizen science agencies, including OBIS-AU. Many OBIS-AU published datasets are harvested and republished by ALA and vice-versa.OBIS-AU identifies, performs Quality Control and formats marine biodiversity and observation data, then publishes directly to the OBIS international data repository and portal, using GBIF IPT technology. The ALA data processing pipeline harvests, aggregates and enhances datasets from many sources with authoritative taxonomic and spatial reference data before passing the data on to GBIF. OBIS-AU and ALA are working together to ensure that the publication pathways for any datasets managed by both (with potential for duplication of records and incomplete metadata harvests) are rationalised and that a single collaborative workflow across both units is followed for publication to GBIF. Recently, the data management groups have established an agreement to cooperatively publish marine data and eDNA data. OBIS-AU have commenced publishing datasets directly to GBIF with ALA endorsement.We present the convergent evolution of OBIS and GBIF data publishing in Australia, adaptive data workflows to maintain data and metadata integrity, challenges encountered, how domain expertise ensures data quality and the benefits of sharing data skills and code, especially in publishing eDNA data types in DwC (using the DNA-derived data extension) and exploring the new CamTrap Data Package using Frictionless data. We also present the work that both data groups are doing toward adopting the GBIF new Unified Data model for publishing data. This Australian case study demonstrates the strengths of collaborative data publishing and offers a model that minimises replication of data in global aggregators through the development of regional integrated data publishing pipelines

Collaborative Development of Multilingual Thesauri with VocBench (System Description and Demonstrator)

VocBench is an open source web application for editing of SKOS and SKOS-XL thesauri, with a strong focus on collaboration, supported by workflow management for content validation and publication. Dedicated user roles provide a clean separation of competences, addressing different specificities ranging from management aspects to vertical competences on content editing, such as conceptualization versus terminology editing. Extensive support for scheme management allows editors to fully exploit the possibilities of the SKOS model, as well as to fulfill its integrity constraints. We describe here the main features of VocBench, which will be shown along the demo held at the ESWC15 conferenc

Designing and implementing an integrated non-communicable disease primary care intervention in rural Nepal

International audienceLow-income and middle-income countries are struggling with a growing epidemic of non-communicable diseases. To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, their healthcare systems need to be strengthened and redesigned. The Starfield 4Cs of primary care—first-contact access, care coordination, comprehensiveness and continuity—offer practical, high-quality design options for non-communicable disease care in low-income and middle-income countries. We describe an integrated non-communicable disease intervention in rural Nepal using the 4C principles. We present 18 months of retrospective assessment of implementation for patients with type II diabetes, hypertension and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. We assessed feasibility using facility and community follow-up as proxy measures, and assessed effectiveness using singular ‘at-goal’ metrics for each condition. The median follow-up for diabetes, hypertension and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease was 6, 6 and 7 facility visits, and 10, 10 and 11 community visits, respectively (0.9 monthly patient touch-points). Loss-to-follow-up rates were 16%, 19% and 22%, respectively. The median time between visits was approximately 2 months for facility visits and 1 month for community visits. ‘At-goal’ status for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease improved from baseline to endline (p=0.01), but not for diabetes or hypertension. This is the first integrated non-communicable disease intervention, based on the 4C principles, in Nepal. Our experience demonstrates high rates of facility and community follow-up, with comparatively low lost-to-follow-up rates. The mixed effectiveness results suggest that while this intervention may be valuable, it may not be sufficient to impact outcomes. To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, further implementation research is urgently needed to determine how to optimise non-communicable disease interventions.This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial