The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN) is committed to helping combat and eradicate world hunger. Information dissemination is an important and necessary tool in furthering this cause, and we need to provide consistent, usable access to information for the community of people doing this very work. The wide recognition of FAO as a neutral international centre of excellence in agriculture positions it perfectly to lead in the growth and improvement of knowledge representation systems in the agricultural domain.
Above discussed Semantic Web applications could contribute to this mission. The need for improved information management mechanisms within the various knowledge domains of this organization is therefore evident.
The Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS) Project evolved from this motivation and has been initiated to act as a reference tool for ontology creation to enable the transfer of the agricultural information domain towards the Semantic Web. The goals of the AOS are to increase the efficiency and consistency of describing and relating multilingual agricultural resources, to decrease the random nature and increase the functionality for accessing these resources and to enable sharing of common descriptions, definitions and relations within the agricultural community. To achieve these goals the AOS assists community partners in the creation of ontologies and related activities. The project, which will be presented in this document, serves as a prototype within the AOS framework and shall serve as a reference to further activities. A comprehensive and reusable methodology, which can be applied to any other domain, is to be evaluated by this prototype. A multilingual, extendable model for the representation of domain ontologies builds the core baseline of this methodology and will be presented in the following section.
