1.1 The general problem
Specialized distributed systems are the reality of today's information systems architecture. Developing specialized information systems/resources in response to specific user needs and/or area of specialization has its own advantage in fulfilling the information needs of target users. However, such systems usually use different knowledge organization tools such as vocabularies, taxonomies and classification systems to manage and organize information. Although the practice of using knowledge organization tools to support document tagging (thesaurus-based indexing) and information retrieval (thesaurus-based search) improves the functions of a particular information system, it is leading to the problem of integrating information from different sources due to lack of semantic interoperability that exists among knowledge organization tools used in different information systems.
The different fishery information systems and portals that provide access to fishery information resources are one example of such scenario. This paper demonstrates the proposed solution to solve the problem of information integration in fishery information systems. The proposal shows how a fishery ontology that integrates the different thesauri and taxonomies in the fishery domain could help in integrating information from different sources be it for a simple one-access portal or a sophisticated web services application.
1.2 The local scenario
Fishery Ontology Service (FOS) is a key feature of the Enhanced Online Multilingual Fishery Thesaurus, a project aimed at information integration in the fishery domain. It undertakes the problem of accessing and/or integrating fishery information that is already partly accessible from dedicated portals and other web services.
The organisations involved in the project are: FAO Fisheries Department (FIGIS), ASFA Secretariat, FAO WAICENT (GIL), the oneFish service of SIFAR, and the Ontology and Conceptual Modelling Group at IP-CNR. The systems to be integrated are: the "reference tables" underlying the FIGIS portal [1], the ASFA online thesaurus [2], the fishery part of the AGROVOC online thesaurus [3], and the oneFish community directory [4].
The official task of the project is "to achieve better indexing and retrieval of information, and increased interaction and knowledge sharing within the fishery community". The focus is therefore on tasks (indexing, retrieval, and sharing of mainly documentary resources) that involve recognising an internal structure in the content of texts (documents, web sites, etc.). Within the semantic web community and the intelligent information integration research area (cf. [5] and [6]), it is becoming widely accepted that content capturing, integration, and management require the development of detailed, formal ontologies.
In this paper we sketch an outline of the FOS development and some hint of the functionalities that it carries out.
