AOS

1

• AOS

Project And Realization
2
November 2001

• FAO launches the AOS Initiative
• 1. AOS workshop in Rome
• Building of a Launch Group for the AOS
• Decision about Prototypes
• But
• extreme scepticism about the usability
  Ontologies , RDF, Semantic Web were very,
  very strange words at that time, nearly
  embarrassing to use

3
May 2004

• RDF and OWL have become official Recommendations
  by the W3C
• The last Gartner report declared
  Taxonomies/Ontologies to one of the key
  technologies of the next year
• Everyone uses the word Ontology without being
  embarrassed
• BUT

4
May 2004

• There is still no AOS
• The Launch Group dissociated soon after the 2.
  Workshop in Oxford
• None of the decided prototypes has been
  materialized as it was planned
• So did we fail?

5
By No Means!

• In 2001 we were anticipating knowledge,
  technology and institutional availability for
  the introduction of semantic technology into
  Agricultural Information Systems
• And we were right to do so

6
Where are we today? - Awareness

• Awareness has grown, who today denies that
  semantic matters?
• 5 AOS Workshops and various publications had an
  impact (We get now invitations to other
  conferences)
• The AGROVOC downloads have risen to about
  5-10/month
• Similar initiatives are following (Ecoterm)

7
Where are we today? - Research
8
(No Transcript)
9
Where are we today? - Applications

• First Portals in FAO using RDFS encoded
  Ontologies
• The Fishery Ontology is a very ambitious project
  to integrated information access in that domain
• Participation in projects on CWR, Food Safety..
• Transferring bibliographical databases in
  ontological structures
• Other projects

10
Where are we today? - Funding

• The AOS by itself needs a stronger institutional
  backbone to attract donor money
• GIL has attracted (is in preparation for) donor
  money in smaller projects (EU 6th framework,
  CGIAR trusts)

11
Do We Need to change the AOS concept?

• Tim Berners Lee The web is like a big relational
  database without relations
• And every one knows wildly added table, records,
  non defined relations will lead to data
  corruption
• That is where the AOS projects wants to
  contribute.Defining meaningful concepts and
  relations for common use.

12
We Do Not Need to change the AOS concept!
Extraction of KOS
KOS uses components to build an application
Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS) Federated
storage and description facility for Knowledge
Organization Systems
Adding of more KOS
Discussions and choices for amendments to
components
13

• The Agricultural Ontology Service is an approach
  to organize knowledge organization systems that
  is
• International
• The Internet must become plurilingual
• Multidisciplinary
• The area of subjects is broad and needs various
  inputs

14

• Cooperative
• different expert knowledge has to be associated
  and used
• Distributed
• no central ownership should be looked for
• Coordinated
• Coordination must ensure reusability and
  standardization

15
Where are we today lessons learned

• Using existing Ontologies (bibliographical
  databases)
• Put bits and pieces together
• Reform AGROVOC
• Resolve the AGROVOC/ CABTHESAURUS/ NAL Thesaurus
  relation
• Go for Microfunding
• Get the institutional framework bigger

16
The Information Management Clearinghouse

• More and more organizations are concerned about
  consistency and coherence in Agricultural
  Information Systems
• May 2003 DFID workshop about this topic. In the
  Report FAO is asked to seek for a clearinghouse
  on Standards

17
The next steps in the AOS initiative

• (Many small ones Portals, Domain Ontologies,
  collaborations, funding proposals)
• The AOS Concept and Terminology Server
  (Webservice)
• Manifesto for the Semantic Standards network
• Next Coherence workshop in September in Rome