AGROVOC Semantic Data Interoperability on Food and Agriculture AGROVOC Semantic Data Interoperability on Food and Agriculture
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AGROVOC Semantic data interoperability on food and agriculture AGROVOC Semantic data interoperability on food and agriculture Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Rome, 2021 ii Required citation: The designations employed and the presentation of material in this FAO. 2021. AGROVOC – Semantic information product do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever data interoperability on food on the part of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and agriculture. Rome. (FAO) concerning the legal or development status of any country, territory, city https://doi.org/10.4060/cb2838en or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. The mention of specific companies or products of manufacturers, whether or not these have been patented, does not imply that these have been endorsed or recommended by FAO in preference to others of a similar nature that are not mentioned. 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Queries regarding rights and licensing should be submitted to: [email protected]. iii Contents Acronyms and abbreviations v Executive summary vii 1 Data sharing and interoperability 1 1.1 Vocabularies 1 1.2 Vocabularies and the FAIR principles 3 1.3 Vocabularies and Linked Data 4 1.4 Resource Description Framework (RDF) 6 2 Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) 7 2.1 Sharing versus creating a new KOS 9 2.2 Using, integrating and merging a KOS 10 3 AGROVOC 11 3.1 The AGROVOC concept model 12 3.2 AGROVOC VoID 14 3.3 Copyright and licensing 14 4 Accessing AGROVOC 15 4.1 Browsing and searching in Skosmos 16 4.2 The Skosmos API 18 4.3 Web-based SPARQL interface 19 4.4 SOAP web services 20 5 Contributing to AGROVOC 21 5.1 Community-based content curation 21 5.2 Benefits of joining AGROVOC 22 5.3 The AGROVOC editorial guidelines 23 5.3.1 The Agrontology 24 5.3.2 Alignments 25 5.4 Subvocabularies 25 5.5 Suggesting new terms 28 iv 6 VocBench: editorial workflow 29 7 VocBench: navigating AGROVOC 31 7.1 Browsing and searching in VocBench 31 7.2 Searching through a SPARQL query in VocBench 33 8 VocBench: curating AGROVOC 35 8.1 Adding a new term 35 8.1.1 Adding a preferred term 35 8.1.2 Adding an alternative term 35 8.2 Editing an existing term 36 8.3 Adding a new concept 37 8.4 Adding other properties 38 8.5 Adding a relationship between concepts 40 8.6 Mapping to an external concept (alignments) 40 9 VocBench: curating a subvocabulary 41 9.1 Associating concepts with a new scheme 43 9.2 Creating scheme-specific hierarchical properties 44 9.3 Implementing the scheme-specific hierarchy 46 9.3.1 Positioning a concept in the scheme-specific hierarchy 46 10 VocBench: importing and exporting 47 10.1 SPARQL and Sheet2RDF to export and import data 47 10.1.1 Importing translations 48 Glossary 51 Bibliography 53 Annex 1 List of AGROVOC editorial institutions 2020 57 Annex 2 AGROVOC 25 top concepts 58 v Abbreviations and acronyms AGRIS International System for Agricultural Science and Technology BT Broader Term CSV Comma-separated values DOI Digital Object Identifier FAIR Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable FAO Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations FAOTERM FAO Terminology FTP File Transfer Protocol GEMET General Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol ISO International Organization for Standardization JSON JavaScript Object Notation KOS Knowledge Organization System LOD Linked Open Data NKOS AP Networked Knowledge Organization Systems Dublin Core Application Profile NT Narrower Term OKFN Open Knowledge Foundation OWL Web Ontology Language RDF Resource Description Framework RT Related Term SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System SKOS-XL Simple Knowledge Organization System eXtension for Labels SQL Structured Query Language URI Uniform Resource Identifier URL Uniform Resource Locator VoID Vocabulary of Interlinked Datasets XML eXtensible Markup Language W3C World Wide Web Consortium vi AGROVOC is a multilingual and controlled vocabulary designed to cover concepts and terminology under FAO’s areas of interest. vii Executive summary Since the early 1980’s, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has coordinated AGROVOC, a valuable tool for classifying data homogeneously, facilitating interoperability and reuse. AGROVOC is a multilingual and controlled vocabulary designed to cover concepts and terminology under FAO’s areas of interest. It is the largest Linked Open Data set about agriculture available for public use and its greatest impact is through providing the access and visibility of data across domains and languages. AGROVOC provides a way to organize knowledge for subsequent data retrieval and consists of a structured collection of concepts, terms, definitions and relationships. Concepts represent anything in food and agriculture, such as maize, hunger, aquaculture, value chains or forestry; these concepts are used to unambiguously identify resources, allowing standardized indexing processes to make searching more efficient. Each AGROVOC concept also has terms used to express it in various languages, known as lexicalizations. Today, AGROVOC consists of more than 38 000 concepts and 800 000 terms in up to 40 languages. Over recent years, AGROVOC has evolved to become a valued information resource worldwide with more than 30 milllion accesses a year. This book aims to increase awareness of the use of AGROVOC to enhance the accessibility and visibility of information and data, as well as to inform about the latest technical developments, recommended standards and various ways to engage with AGROVOC. This publication is especially targeted at individuals and institutions who are interested in controlled vocabularies and SKOS, who may also wish to use AGROVOC or improve its usage, and those who may wish to contribute to AGROVOC, either through the AGROVOC editorial community or as part of a community of experts. 1 1 Data sharing and interoperability In agriculture, data exchange is While there has never been as much data and essential for research and innovation information available as now, it is not always simple as well as for business, including for to find the right information: it is distributed, fragmented, and often compartmentalized. Today, market prices, infrastructure, and online availability does not imply accessibility. weather information. Metadata therefore plays a crucial role in making data findable; while data are the actual pieces of Data exchange is also needed for policy and information like numbers, dates or literal values; regulations, such as tracking of food products and metadata contains information about the data. use of pesticides. Key factors that have changed the nature of data sharing in recent decades are the Metadata is “structured data about anything that can advent of computers and digital data, the Internet be named, such as Web pages, books, journal articles, and, more recently, the cloud and big data images, songs, products, processes, people (and their technologies, which have multiplied the potential of activities), research data, concepts, and services” data processing power. Over the last decade, (DCMI: Metadata Basics, n.d.) machines have become the primary data consumers and the actual intermediaries in the data-sharing process; therefore, data must be machine-readable 1.1 Vocabularies in order to be shared. A vocabulary is a data model comprised of classes, The Semantic Web aims to make online information properties and relationships, which can be used for machine-readable and it is an extension of the describing data and metadata. It also defines World Wide Web through standards set by the agreed values, ideally in different languages, and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).