knowledge organization for a food secure world Agrisemantics knowledge organization for a food secure world Sophie Aubin - eROSA workshop - 7 June 2017 - Montpellier

DOCUMENTATION & METADATA The data ecosystem access processing integration vizualization DATA SERVICES & APPS format exchange workflow meaning identity rights © INTEROPERABILITY FACILITIES authentification & security computing capacity network DOCUMENTATION & METADATA archive storage inference rules Semantics contributes to interoperability with: common representations and namings object identity inference rules distributed data sources GOVERNANCE

Our goal and vision Make data integration and interoperability effective and easy! Define what is needed and what is missing to support correct uses of semantics for data interoperability in agriculture Build on existing components for semantic content and services serving other bricks of the ecosystem

Many types of semantic resources Different semantic resources and degree of semantic richness for different purposes! schemas: ontologies value vocabularies: lists of entities, classification systems, thesauri, taxonomies, classification systems… They operate at the data and the metadata levels CC: duplicated slide, I make Sources: "Map of data standards for food and agriculture“ + RDA Agrisemantics landscaping report

A populated landscape of usages and tools Identified 5 big groups of activities related with data that involve some sorts of semantic resources (different degrees of semantic richness) indexing information extraction organization of data data integration reasoning Many tools and services for editing, sharing, aligning Interest of research with leading domains (e.g. plant science) CC: duplicated slide, I make Sources: RDA Agrisemantics landscaping report

The problem: a fragmented landscape Proliferation of resources, because resources are local, scarcely reusable, often not in machine readable or open formats, difficulties in extending existing resources (easier to create new ones) “Semantics” generally poorly defined (common complaint: an OWL file does not make an ontology), little understood and (fully) applied, perceived as a matter of specialists In short, improve on: findability, accessibility, governance, logical rigour Those issues are not specific to agriculture and nutrition! CC: duplicated slide, I make Sources: "Map of data standards for food and agriculture“ + RDA Agrisemantics landscaping report

Where we want to go: Global semantics for agriculture and nutrition Turn the Web into a vast, distributed dictionary for knowledge organization, following: FAIR principles semantics help addressing some FAIR principles semantic resources have to be FAIR themselves Semantic Web / Linked Open Data standard vocabularies HTTP URIs as globally unique identifiers of the concepts mappings between concepts of different sources This is a community issue!

The pillars of Agrisemantics Map of data standards for food and agriculture: a catalog of standards, including semantics or not, for agriculture and food data. AgroPortal: a repository of ontologies and knowledge organization systems related to agriculture and neighbouring domains. It offers facilities to host, search, version, visualize, comment, and test semantic structures, as well as to store and exploit ontology alignments. Global Agricultural Concept Scheme (GACS): 15,000 high-level, lightly defined concepts that constitute a pool of URIs that are already usable: for tagging information and datasets for discovery (semantic annotation) as building blocks for constructing other, more detailed knowledge organization systems such as ontologies. The community: the RDA Agrisemantics Working group and other IGAD WG, the GODAN GACS group, the MTSR conference, the eROSA project…

Next: clarify the vision What is needed to achieve good semantics for data/systems/services interoperability? J Join the Agrisemantics “I have a dream” sessions in Montreal IGAD pre-RDA P10 meeting (Sep. 17-18) RDA 10th plenary (Sep. 19-21)