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NeOn partner, The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United
Nations (FAO), has recently launched the first AGROVOC E-Conference
that will be open to participants until the 29 June 2007. The purpose
of the E-conference is to gather requirements for further AGROVOC
enhancement directly from the AGROVOC user community, in order to
analyze and incorporate those needs in the medium to long term plan and
strategy, for the most used Agricultural thesaurus since 1980. AGROVOC
is one of the resources that FAO are using in the NeOn Over-fishing
Alerts Case Study.
To date, the E-conference has been a great success in terms of very
constructive feedback received from users, number of participants and
global coverage: more than 160 participants, from 42 countries covering
all continents.
The highlights of the two phases just completed are:
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Phase 1 2-4 May 2007:
Introductions, stage setting wherein the participants were introduced
to the conference, its agenda and the process. They were also asked to
present themselves via a small questionnaire. Out of thus far
registered 160 participants, 92 sent in their introductions. The
E-Conference has over 55% participation from the Asia and the Pacific,
Africa and Central and South America. This is extremely impressive
given that normally it is very difficult for participants from these
parts of the world to travel to conferences.
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Phase 2 7-18
May 2007: Current AGROVOC services and functionalities were discussed
during this phase. The feedback from participants showed that
most of them were using AGROVOC for indexing and retrieval.
The participants requested that AGROVOC be made available in OWL and
OBO formats. Additional feedback was also received from the web-based
users on improving the search interface on the Agricultural Information
Management Standards Website1. Of those participants who responded to the issue of using plain search vs. advanced
search, most use plain searching. One participant replied that they had
tried to use advanced search functionalities with only limited success.
Although, advanced search would be desirable and lead to more ‘refined’
results, more training and enhanced systems are needed to make it more
effective.
The E-Conference will run until end of June and will cover:
Additional background about AGROVOC thesaurus and Concept Server (CS).
The AGROVOC Thesaurus was developed by the FAO and the European
Commission (EC), in the early 1980s. AGROVOC is a multilingual
structured thesaurus of all subject fields in agriculture, forestry,
fisheries, food and related domains (e.g. environment). It consists of
words or expressions (terms), in different languages and organized in
relationships (e.g. broader, narrower, and related),
and is used to identify or search resources. Its main role is to
standardize the indexing process in order to make searching simpler and
more efficient, and to provide the user with the most relevant
resources. Presently, it is updated by FAO roughly every three months.
AGROVOC can be downloaded freely for non-commercial use. It is
available in TBX, SKOS, MySQL, TagText, ISO2709, XML, and Microsoft
Access formats.
AGROVOC is the foundation that underpins the development of the Concept
Server (CS) project. Using the knowledge contained in vocabulary
systems and thesauri such as AGROVOC, the CS will be able to develop
specialized domain-specific terminologies and concepts that will better
support information management in the Web environment. A key objective
is to add more semantics to the thesaurus, for example, by expanding
and better specifying the relationships between concepts.
Reference:
1 Agricultural Information Management Standards Web site
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