AGROVOC Webinar: Land governance lost in translation: adopting semantic technologies to increase the discoverability of land data and information
As part of the 3rd AGROVOC Editorial Community Workshop, organized by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Laura Meggiolaro, Land Portal Foundation, presented a webinar on 29 June 2020.
The webinar focused on Land governance lost in translation: adopting semantic technologies to increase the discoverability of land data and information. We definitely live in the era of big data and a huge amount of data and information has been produced in all disciplines during the last decade. Despite the increasingly interconnected world in which we live, language and technological barriers continue to be a very serious constraint to effectively exchange and learn from the plethora of information now available to us. Land is a topic that is discussed in many languages, in different academic disciplines and in all parts of the world. Many attempts have been made in the past to find common definitions and terminologies for land issues, but a wide consensus or adoption has not yet been reached. A new "thesaurus" LandVoc hopes to change this trend.
LandVoc is a thesaurus covering a taxonomy of concepts and terms related to the land issues. The current LandVoc version includes 310 concepts relating to all areas of interest of the land community, including land administration, land governance, land use, investment and coverage, etc. It is available in English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Khmer, Vietnamese, Thai, Arabic, Hindi, Swahili and other languages. It is published by FAO and exists as a sub-scheme within AGROVOC. The Land Portal Foundation has curated LandVoc since 2012, providing concrete suggestions and feedback and actively engaging with the AGROVOC FAO team on one hand and exchanging with a community of land experts to scope, review and enrich LandVoc on the other hand.
Auteur(s)
Laura Meggiolaro
Laura Meggiolaro is Team Leader at the Land Portal Foundation since 2011. Over the past 16 years Laura has been specialising in knowledge management for development with an increasing passion for the information ecology and data ecosystem that characterises the land governance sector where she focuses on enhancing land data discoverability and interoperability through open standards and semantic technologies. She holds a master in communication sciences and a master in economics for developments. Since 2011 Laura has been responsible for the overall management, implementation and expansion of the Land Portal contributing to the process that has seen the Land Portal evolving from a project into an independent organization and from a simple data repository into a leading knowledge broker and one of the most innovative digital resources promoting data exchange, dialogue and collaboration.
Prior to coming to the Land Portal Foundation she has been working for the development sector collaborating with UN agencies and civil society organizations, including the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the Internal Land Coalition at the Internal Found for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and ActionAid, specialising in information and knowledge management for land rights.
