Title: Publishing agro-environmental resources as linked data

Authors: Saša Nešić; Andrea E. Rizzoli; Ioannis N. Athanasiadis

Addresses: IDSIA – DalleMolle Institute for Artificial Intelligence, University of Lugano, Lugano, Manno 6928, Switzerland ' IDSIA – DalleMolle Institute for Artificial Intelligence, University of Lugano, Lugano, Manno 6928, Switzerland ' Democritus University of Thrace, Xanthi 67100, Greece

Abstract: Publishing environmental resources to the linked environmental data requires resource publishers to conform to a set of universally recognised linked data principles. These principles, however, do not consider domain-specific semantics that are crucial for building a semantically unified environmental information space over the linked environmental data. In this paper we present an approach to publishing agro-environmental resources to the linked environmental data that extends the universal linked data principles by taking into account domain semantics of the agro-environmental domain. The approach relies on an underlying environmental resource model and introduces a set of publishing principles that should enable semantic integration of the linked agro-environmental resources. According to the proposed principles this integration happens over time as a result of conjoint acting of the resource providers and resource users. In order to prove feasibility of the approach we developed a supporting software system called AGROPub. In this paper we demonstrate three main use-cases of the system: resource annotation and publishing; resource linking; resource evaluation, on the example of some real-world agro-environmental resources. The processes realised by these three AGROPub use-cases, all together, should enable the full integration of the linked agro-environmental resources into the semantically unified environmental information space.

Keywords: linked data; semantic annotation; semantic linking; environmental resources; resource modelling; agro-environmental resources; semantic integration; semantics.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMSO.2012.048507

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 2012 Vol.7 No.1, pp.25 - 36

Received: 12 Dec 2011
Accepted: 15 Jan 2012
Published online: 31 Dec 2014 *

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