The Agricultural Ontology Server: A Tool for Knowledge Organisation and Integration

At FAO, we are committed to helping combat and eradicate world hunger. Information dissemination is an important and necessary tool in furthering this cause—we need to provide consistent, usable access to information for users in places doing this very work. And, the wide recognition of FAO as a neutral international centre of excellence for agriculture positions it perfectly to lead in the development of system specific agricultural ontologies. The Agricultural Ontology Server (AOS) will be instrumental in this effort by structuring agricultural terminology, thus making describing, defining and relating this information manageable for distributed facilities, and by standardising agricultural terminology, thus making resource access and discovery more efficient. The AOS will function as a central common reference tool for serving ontologies. Itself an ontology using the AGROVOC thesaurus as its core, it will contain and serve terms, definitions of those terms and the relationships among those terms. It is designed to serve as a focal point for the vocabulary of the agricultural domain, and to codify and standardise the knowledge within this domain. It will serve common core terms and relationships, as well as richer relationships that designate it as an ontology. The AOS will provide the " building blocks " needed to develop and maintain other ontologies. Knowledge systems will be able to interact directly with the AOS using a suite of ontological tools to perform resource description, relationship building, indexing and discovery functions, among others. Once ontologies are created for these knowledge systems, they can be used, enhanced and re-used by other knowledge systems. In effect, the AOS will provide modules of terms, definitions and relationships that can be shared among knowledge systems. The use of current standards and tools developed for this purpose will ensure efficient communication among these systems. The proposed project to develop the AOS would: 1. Determine the types of users and tools that will use the server. 2. Utilise all the important knowledge organisation systems presently available and being developed. 3. Utilise current state-of-the-art encoding and interoperability standards. 4. Map and enhance relationships among terms to create ontologies. 5. Build in functionality to describe and find multilingual resources. 6. Create an agriculturally focused biological taxonomy to become an integral part of the server. 7. Develop and license authoring and maintenance tools and interfaces for use of the server. 8. Pilot test the server using specific user and application types, and further develop based …