From GACS to Agrisemantics – steps forward towards interoperability of data for agriculture and nutrition

Caterina CaraccioloFAO

GACS?

= Global Agriculture Concept Scheme

• To make a common repository of terminological and conceptual information in agriculture– Many similar initiatives in the area, with both some

overlaps and differences, but no coordination• To achieve efficiency of scale by maintaining core

concepts in cooperation

GACS vocabularies – The Thesauri involved

Overlap between AGROVOC, NALT, CABT - Estimated

AGROVOC, NALT, CABI – similarity in use

All are used within applications of similar nature – here our application of choice, used in GACS

GACS WG basics - Who

• Representatives from each organization• 2 independent consultants• Involved also CGIAR

GACS output so far (Apr ‘14- Jul ‘15)

• GACS beta online: • http://tester-os-kktest.lib.helsinki.fi/gacsdemo/en/ • A core of 15,000 concepts, ~400k terms– Organisms– Places– Chemicals– “General” concepts

• Information available results from a “merge” of the three• All RDF-SKOS

GACS Beta

Ongoing

• Finalizing the resolution of “lumps”– The mapping of A ->B and then B –> C resulted in

potentially problematic groups of concepts • “Clean up” labels, e.g. to harmonize use of

sing/plur• Move in a fully functional editing environment

Ongoing cont’d

• Decide on needed concept types, e.g., for organisms, chemicals, ..

• How to deal with non-identical hierarchies when merging mapped concepts

• Define general policy for dealing with scientific and common names of organisms (are different things? Or different names for the same things?)

GACS approach to data interoperability

• Goal: access and aggregate data of diverse source, and be able to combine it and use in information systems different than those of origin

• Given a set of concept schemes, establish correspondences so that data described with them may be meaningfully reused in different applications

After GACS - Agrisemantics

• Goal – a BMGF project• Project proposal is in early stage of development• Discussion started during a workshop in Rome, see: • Goal: Expand GACS in terms of: – Coverage, by hooking in other similar vocabularies– Typology of resources involved. Goal: Formalize and use

the intuitive connections between the concepts contained in thesauri and concepts used to describe other type of resources – e.g., reference data for time series, ontologies used for data annotation etc.

Some pointers

• To follow progress, check out http://aims.fao.org and subscribe to the user communit

• Agrisemantics Workshop July 2015 –- page contains links to background material: http://aims.fao.org/agrisemantics-workshop-2015