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 of the United Nations (FAO). The type of geopolitical information addressed by this work include country international classifications, country names in the five FAO languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French and Spanish), and other geographical information such as 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 semanticsoriented 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. 1 Background and Motivations Dealing with data about countries and regions is part of the day-to-day work of most international organizations. FAO is not an exception in this respect, as it manages and exchanges data about the subjects of its competence (i.e., agriculture and food security), regarding its 190 Member Nations [1] and other territories in the world. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations leads international efforts to defeat hunger. Serving both developed and developing countries, ? Authors are listed in alphabetical order. 1 As at 11 Aprile 2006. 2 The designations employed and the presentation of material do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Food and Agriculture OrgaFAO acts as a neutral forum where all nations meet as equals to negotiate agreements and debate policy. FAO is also a source of knowledge and information, to help developing countries and countries in transition modernize and improve agriculture, forestry and fisheries practices and ensure good nutrition for all. FAO was founded in 1945, focusing special attention on developing rural areas, home to 70 percent of the world’s poor and hungry people. Managing information is crucial to FAO and that is reflected in Article 1 of its Constitution, which reads that “The organization must collect, analyze, interpret, and disseminate information relating to nutrition, food and agriculture and development.” Over the last decade, much effort has been put in the organization and management of geopolitical information such as matching different country classifications and code systems, streamlining the multilingual updates of official names and managing geographic and economic groups. In 1995, FAO established a support structure to foster the dissemination of agricultural information through its World Agricultural Information Centre (WAICENT) [2].Part of the mandate of WAICENT is to enable countries to make their own information available using electronic means to reach wider audiences and contribute to knowledge in agriculture worldwide. In addition, in the last years, FAO started the Agricultural Information Management Standards (AIMS) initiative [3] to increase coherence among agricultural information systems, to create a clearing house for information management standards used to make existing or new agricultural information systems interoperable, and to share and promote the uptake of common methodologies, standards and applications. Notwithstanding the substantial work carried out during the last years, the potential of exploiting the information that FAO generates by country or region remains at a very low level, circumscribed in general to single systems and with very limited interoperability. Figure 1 depicts most common organization of information systems within FAO where each application (managing statistics, maps or documents) accesses its own corresponding database. Although some information systems use XML DTDs and XML Schemas for exchanging data, this mechanism is not general enough to provide interoperability across applications and semantics are needed, given the numerous country-and region-based systems in the Organization. Another source of common problems stems from legacy databases and corporate systems not built around geopolitical based information but using this information for cataloguing purposes. In those cases, the major problem is the management of historical records. For example, records catalogued years ago usnization of the United Nations concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area, or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. In some cases, the designations “developed countries” and “developing countries” are intended for statistical convenience and do not necessarily reflect a judgement of the stage reached by a particular country or area in the development