Agrotags: a contribution towards improved digital information management in agricultural research

Agricultural research generates highly locale-specific as well as abstract or location-neutral information. Because of this diversity and the need to build prescriptive practices out of such information, agricultural research information management on the web requires semantic enablement. Keyword assignment is an important step towards achieving this. In this paper we describe a taxonomy called Agrotags which is designed for tagging agriculture research documents. Agrotags is a broad subset of Agrovoc, the International thesaurus of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and is much smaller about 2,100 as against 40,000 terms. Agrotags is manually created by carefully examining each of the Agrovoc terms for their utility in tagging. This selected subset is further refined and validated by looking at the manually assigned keywords from the FAO AGRIS databases. This is used in a new platform called OpenAgri that can be used to build institutional or network-based repositories of agricultural research documents.