AGROVOC Thesaurus as Linked Open Data

We just announced the AGROVOC Thesaurus as Linked Open Data. You can find more information

http://aims.fao.org/news/agrovoc-thesaurus-released-linked-open-data


Soon, I am going to write something on it.

A new face of thesauri

It was an amazing experience to work on making a new face of thesauri. In order to accomplish the work, we had to map 5 thesauri together. It was not so difficult for me to work on mapping activities, since I had an research experience on this field. It was difficult to understand the formats of different thesauri. I took decision that I would consider only concept URIs and its labels. It worked perfectly.

So, I parsed all the files and put into the database. Later on, I run my existing routine which was build on INRIA mapping API. I considered 8 eight element level matchers in order to perform these matching tasks. The results of all mappings had been verified by a domain expert . Here is an example,

The concept “Europe” from AGROVOC is mapped with NAL, EUROVOC, LCSH, GEMET and STW thesauri.

One of the goal is to make mother thesaurus as a reference vocabulary so that it can be used to retrieve the information, managing the information. Furthermore, it can be used also further mapping purposes taking into account as background knowledge. It is a new face of thesauri.

My working experiences in the mapping between thesauri

It was an amazing experience to work with large agriculture datasets in order to publish it into the Linked Open Data. It can be used as a background knowledge in the future since there is no universal background knowledge dataset in the world. Recently, I was refreshing my mind with mapping techniques and results after my PhD. I run my matcher between AGROVOC-EUROVOC and got a good number of exact matches (1,200). Again, I run the matcher between AGROVOC-GEMET and found 1,150 exact matches. But, I was extremely happy when I got 13,000 matches between AGROVOC and NAL. The idea is to put everything in one file which can provide services as an online shop for agriculture information in the world and connect all people in one platform of learning and browsing infromation. Today, I am writing just an abstract view of my personal opinion. Soon, I will post matching techniques and difficulties. -:).

The role of Information manager and Information flows at the moment

Even though the practice of metadata were changed from catalogue cards to machine-readable formats, for a long time metadata information is stored in repositories as electronic records. During the recent year, the World Wide Web is moving from the web of documents to the web of data. The metadata information is moving from merely machine-readable towards machine-processable, where it is essential to break the record and repository silos and make data (especially metadata) into machine understandable pieces. We present information about the data using the RDF (Resource Description Framework) which provides a data model for presenting metadata as machine-understandable and –processable triple statements (i.e., subject, object, predicate). For example, Adam (subject) is from (predicate) Peru(object). The subject of a triple is the URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) identifying the described resource, a predicate is the existing relationship between subject and object, and an object is a literal value or the URI of resources that is somehow related to the subject. In the above example, “Adam” is a person and “Peru” is a country. Although they represent totally different metadata, they are linked through the predicate (properties) and made it possible to gain the data and information from Adam to Peru such as the population, environment, currency, culture etc. of Peru. Furthermore, the information will be connected into the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud where anybody can join, put their data and access the others information. This can be used by UN organizations, and play the role of one family for providing the services to the world. The linked data will have an impact on e-science, e-government, and e-agriculture.

The roles of information managers have changed due to this movement. The classical information mangers managed the information in order to be findable or searchable in the context of records in a small or large silo. Nowadays the information managers will need to manage the information in order to make it to be accessible, exchangeable, useable, reusable in context of data that are semantically linked, far beyond the boundary of repositories or silos, and far beyond bibliographic data. In my opinion, in the next five years more metadata and raw data will be liberated from silos and join the LOD cloud. The agriculture data will form its own cloud, interacting with other scientific data, geographical data, government data, and social society data. Here metadata is critical for the overall quality of their interaction and reuse. On the other hand, not every current Semantic Web technology has a clear implementation guideline; different models and tools are invented by implementers each month. This is very challenging because it requires information managers to be able to understand the whole landscape and master the technologies quickly and correctly. It is also the new role of the information managers to compare different approaches, identify good practices, and contribute to best practices through their own work

The year 2011 is a personalization of Web

The 2010 was the year of Linked Open Data. Most of the organizations introduce their data in the web as RDF format by breaking their old databases. I think, this year will be more agent based approach for the web. For example, I am in Peris and I would like to get more information about hotel, food, people, night clubs etc from the web. I was working the project "visit findland". It was a primary steps to make your own travel plan by using 2nd generation web technologies. I am expecting this work will continue further in this year and coming years and make people life more easy.

my visit to Stanford University

It was my dream to go to Stanford University. As I always try to follow my supervisor footstep. I started to my journey on 13th of October behind my beloved Nargish at Rome. It was terrible moment in my life to say goodbye to her. I had to do it because I wanted to explore my experience.

I arrived the special Terminal 5, a special terminal for USA flight. Very tight security. After crossing the security, I got into the plan and landed at Philadelphia International Airport. The immigrant officer asked me several question at least 45 min and gave me a seal to my passport to enter the USA. Again flight to San Francisco L. At last I arrived to Stanford Gust house. The Guest house was very nice.

On 14^th , I got up from my bed very early and took my breakfast. I came to know that there was very nice shuttle service for Stanford Campus. I got into the Shuttle and got down in front of the Lab. The Lab Secretary gave me the schedule of meeting with Professor and researchers. Meanwhile, I met two visiting fellow from Germany, Austria. First day, I had a wonderful time with them.

Later on, I met with Professor Mark Musen. He was so kind human being and explained me lots of their work. I also showed my work. He appreciated the work. I also met with Natasha Noy (a key person of Protégé tool, bio-medical ontology). She showed me the work of ICAT, a web-based frame work for protégé tool. They have developed this frame work for WHO. I wonder to see their work. It is similar work that we have done. But, our work has been started at FAO since 2005. It shows the importance of our work. It was also wonderful to work and chat with Timothy Redmond.

I got a little change to visit the campus beside my work. It was amazing environment. I wish I could study in here J. Now, I understood why they are different from others. It is a place for study.

cooking and spending time

I was so busy and stress the last couple of days that I could not do anything in my workplace.