1. The GACS Project Semantics for Open Data
Caterina Caracciolo
FAO

2. GACS = Global Agriculture Concept Scheme
To make a common repository of terminological and conceptual information in agriculture
To achieve efficiency of scale by maintaining core concepts in cooperation
A voluntary project
So far, only funded by in-kind contribution of the partners
Caterina Caracciolo (FAO)

3. Caterina Caracciolo (FAO)
Participants in GACS
Working group:
FAO (AGROVOC)
CABI (CABT)
NAL (NALT)
Steering committee
Those above +
INRA
CGIAR consortium
AgroKnow
Caterina Caracciolo (FAO)

4. Caterina Caracciolo (FAO)
Three thesauri
Caterina Caracciolo (FAO)

5. Why should all this be interesting? #1
Vocabularies are used in concrete applications to describe datasets, pieces of data
Caterina Caracciolo (FAO)

6. Why should all this be interesting? #2
Both vocabularies and data can be linked -> more data getting closer to grasp
E.g. AGROVOC linked to 16, EUROVOC, GEMET, GeoNames, Wikipedia, LCSH, ...
Caterina Caracciolo (FAO)

7. Overlap between AGROVOC, NALT, CABT
Caterina Caracciolo (FAO)

8. Something to consider...

9. Different in concept granularity
AGROVOC: [animal oil], [animal fats]
NALT: [animal fats and oils]

10. Modelling
Common names and scientific names are different things? Or different names for the same things?
E.g. Salmo salar, salmo carpio, salmo ferox - salmon

11. Caterina Caracciolo (FAO)
Where are we now?
First prototype, Beta 1.6
Formed by mapping a core of 10,000 concepts from each vocabulary
Info from matched concepts is aggregated – only Only exact match considered
Result: ~ 15,000 concepts, ~ 400,000 terms
Caterina Caracciolo (FAO)

12. Caterina Caracciolo (FAO)
Ongoing work
Consolidating the hierarchy
Cleaning up some inconsistencies resulting from the merge of concepts
Writing editorial guidelines
To keep track of editorial decisions taken
To guide future editors of GACS
Collecting requirements for the editorial platform that will maintain GACS and related vocabularies
Caterina Caracciolo (FAO)

13. Caterina Caracciolo (FAO)
GACS Beta 1.6
Caterina Caracciolo (FAO)

14. Caterina Caracciolo (FAO)
Highlights
All RDF-SKOS
Also tools come from partners:
SKOSMOS for visualization (Finnish National Library)
VocBench for data maintenance (U Tor Vergata, Rome IT & FAO)
Caterina Caracciolo (FAO)

15. Caterina Caracciolo (FAO)
Next steps
Release data officially
Place GACS in the larger context of data interoperability
Caterina Caracciolo (FAO)

16. A vision: AgriSemantics
An ecosystem of vocabularies and metadata standards for data related to agriculture
GACS would be a “core”, connected to domain-specific (e.g., soil, species, chemicals, ..) and data-specific (textual documents, statistics, maps, ..) “extensions”
Leverage collaboration with similar/complementary existing initiatives
E.g. AgroPortal
Caterina Caracciolo (FAO)

17. References A web site will be set up soon
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