Title: Thesaurus maintenance, alignment and publication as linked data: the AGROVOC use case

Authors: Caterina Caracciolo; Armando Stellato; Sachit Rajbahndari; Ahsan Morshed; Gudrun Johannsen; Johannes Keizer; Yves Jaques

Addresses: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO of the UN), v.le Terme di Caracalla 1, 00154 Rome, Italy ' University of Rome, Tor Vergata, Via del Politecnico 1, 00133 Rome, Italy ' Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO of the UN), v.le Terme di Caracalla 1, 00154 Rome, Italy ' Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO of the UN), v.le Terme di Caracalla 1, 00154 Rome, Italy ' Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO of the UN), v.le Terme di Caracalla 1, 00154 Roma, ' Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO of the UN), v.le Terme di Caracalla 1, 00154 Rome, Italy ' Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO of the UN), v.le Terme di Caracalla 1, 00154 Rome, Italy

Abstract: The AGROVOC multilingual thesaurus maintained by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations is now published as linked data. In order to reach this goal AGROVOC was expressed in Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) and its concepts provided with dereferenceable URIs. AGROVOC is now aligned with ten other multilingual Knowledge Organisation Systems (KOS) related to agriculture, using the SKOS properties exact match and close match. Alignments were automatically produced in Eclipse using a custom-designed tool and then validated by a domain expert. The resulting data is publicly available to both humans and machines using a SPARQL endpoint together with a modified version of Pubby, a lightweight front-end tool for publishing linked data. This paper describes the process that led to the current linked data AGROVOC and discusses current and future applications and directions. This paper extends a shorter version presented at MTSR 2011.

Keywords: AGROVOC multilingual thesaurus; mapping; agriculture; linked data; VocBench, thesauri alignment; OWL; Web Ontology Language; SKOS; simple knowledge organisation system; thesaurus maintenance; Food and Agriculture Organisation; UN FAO.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMSO.2012.048511

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 2012 Vol.7 No.1, pp.65 - 75

Received: 02 Jan 2012
Accepted: 31 Jan 2012

Published online: 31 Dec 2014 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article