Proof and Trust in the OpenAGRIS Implementation

The AGRIS repository is a bibliographic database covering almost forty years of agricultural research. Following the conversion of its indexing thesaurus AGROVOC into a concept-based vocabulary, the decision was made to express the entire AGRIS repository in RDF as Linked Open Data. As part of this exercise, a semantic mashup named OpenAGRIS was developed in order to access the records and use them to dynamically display related data from external systems through both SPARQL queries and traditional web services. The overall process raised numerous issues regarding the relative lack of administrative metadata required to compellingly address the top proof and trust layers of the semantic web stack, both within the AGRIS repository and in external data dynamically pulled into OpenAGRIS. The team began by disambiguating the journals in which the articles were published and converting them into RDF but quickly realized this was only the beginning of a series of necessary steps in moving from a closed to an open world paradigm. Further disambiguation of institutions, authors and AGRIS Centres as well as the use of the VoiD vocabulary and of quality indicator models are discussed and evaluated.