Author: Fisseha, Frehiwot; Hagedorn, Kat; Keizer, Johannes and Katz, Stephen (FAO, Library and Documentation Systems Division)
"Knowledge management is vital for effective decision-making.....It is therefore essential to maintain and improve the coverage, quantity, utility, timeliness and accessibility of the information collected and disseminated." (citation from the Strategic Framework for FAO).
FAO is a huge content provider for the World Wide Web. The FAO website has more than 6 gigabytes of information that contains knowledge created by more than 4000 FAO staff working in the world to combat hunger and to help people create a better life.
The semantic web is based on knowledge representation systems. Creating infrastructure for the semantic web is not only an encoding problem. Topic maps need underlying ontologies, as do any RDF description of web sites. Ontologies are emerging as a key aspect of information management in many areas, from the interchange of engineering data to corporate knowledge management.
To create knowledge representation systems (ontologies), knowledge about the represented domains is needed. This knowledge is not with the developers of encoding systems and software but with the producers and providers of content.
There is no realistic hope of globally classifying all concepts, terms and relationships; we need to be able to manage and interrelate knowledge representation systems (ontologies) project by project, domain by domain, so that scalability is achieved without either runaway complexity or over-simplification.
FAO, together with partners and other stakeholders in the area, has been developing and maintaining knowledge representation systems in the basic form as represented in the AGRIS/CARIS subject categories and the AGROVOC thesaurus for nearly two decades. The advent of the internet and the World Wide Web gives us the possibility to extend the concepts behind these systems.
We are planning to develop an Agricultural Ontology Server (AOS):
To allow domain knowledge to be defined and described
To communicate among domains without semantic ambiguity
To enable reuse of domain knowledge
To share the structure and meaning of agricultural information among users and tools
To provide foundation to build other specific ontologies
And last, but not least:
To provide more effective dissemination and access to knowledge for users
Briefly defined, the Agricultural Ontology Server (AOS) functions as a central common reference tool for serving ontologies. An ontology is a system that contains terms and the definitions of those terms, and the specification of relationships among those terms. It can be thought of as an enhanced thesaurus - it provides all the basic relationships inherent in a thesaurus, plus it defines and enables the creation of more formal and more specific relationships. It is designed to serve as a central focal point for the vocabulary of a particular domain, and to codify and standardise the knowledge within that domain. It enables better communication within and across domains, and structures meaning contained in the domain.
In essence, the AOS provides the "building blocks" that assist in developing and maintaining other ontologies. It will contain the core vocabulary and definitions (multilingual) and the core relationships (including common richer relationships) which subsets of the knowledge domain will use in building and maintaining their own ontologies. For instance, in this case, the AOS provides the reference for all the terminology of the agricultural domain. Knowledge domain subsets, including forestry, fishery, plant biology, sustainable development, organic agriculture and nutrition, will use this reference tool to build their own ontologies. Once these ontologies are created, they can be used to inform knowledge bases - and can be re-used and enhanced by other knowledge bases. This is an iterative process that grows and maintains the ontologies.
