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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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!

8. 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…

9. 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 )
RDA 10th plenary (Sep )