Voting closed 15 Dec. 2012. 109 Liked
AGRIS is a collection of more than 4 million of bibliographic records and it is one of the most important world-wide information systems in the agricultural domain. OpenAGRIS is a Web application entirely based on RDF that aggregates information from different sources to expand the AGRIS knowledge.
FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, is an agency that leads international efforts to defeat hunger. FAO is also a source of knowledge and information, and helps developing countries to improve agriculture, forestry and fisheries practices, trying to achieve food security for everyone.
In this context, in 1974 FAO set up an initiative called AGRIS to make information on agriculture research globally available. AGRIS is a collection of more than 4 million of bibliographic records and it is one of the most important world-wide information systems in the agricultural domain. AGRIS serves a million pages a month, with more than two hundred fifty thousand users accessing the system every month: thus it has a strong and very important audience.
AGRIS bibliographic records are manually created by cataloguers and sometimes suffer of lack of information, like the full text of a document. Specifically, only 3% of the entire collection has a full text link, so the user has to search Google to find the publication. In fact, users, and especially researchers, are interest in the entire content of a publication and not only in its abstract. Moreover, lack of information like connections with related work and related web resources makes impossible to interlink to other sources of data. To allow users to access the fulltext of a publication and all the information the Web knows about a specific research area in the agricultural domain, we developed OpenAGRIS, following Linked Open Data principles.
Linked Open Data
Linked Data is the way to publish structured data and to interlink with other existing datasets, in a machine readable way: to overcome the lack of information of AGRIS records, it was necessary to convert the whole repository in RDF and become part of the Linked Open Data cloud. Thus, more than 100 million triples were generated and used by OpenAgris, a web application that aggregates information from different Web sources to expand the AGRIS knowledge providing much data as possible about a topic or a bibliographical resource.
AGROVOC is a 30 years old multilingual vocabulary containing more than forty thousand concepts in 22 languages and published as Linked Open Data. AGRIS records have been indexed with AGROVOC keywords.
OpenAgris is a Web application that aggregates information from different Web sources to expand the AGRIS knowledge providing much data as possible about a topic or a bibliographical resource. Using Agrovoc as backbone, OpenAgris can interlink with a lot of existing datasets (currently DBPedia, World Bank, Geopolitical Ontology, FAO fisheries dataset, AGRIS serials dataset, and so over), showing as much information as possible about a specific topic, as statistics about fish species or geographical distribution of plants. In this way, OpenAgris will be a centralized portal that will aggregate all information the Web knows about a specific topic, research area (in the agricultural sector) or bibliographic reference.
OpenAgris is based on four internal FAO RDF datasets:
- The AGRIS records dataset, the direct translation of AGRIS XML records to RDF. Considering that AGRIS contains more than 4 million of XML records, this new dataset consists of 100 million triples.
- The Agrovoc RDF dataset: AGROVOC is the world’s most comprehensive multilingual agricultural vocabulary that contains close to 40,000 concepts in 22 languages covering subject fields in agriculture, forestry and fisheries together with cross-cutting themes such as land use, rural livelihoods and food security.
- The AGRIS journals dataset: since the 79.54% of AGRIS records are journal’s article, we created a dataset of more than 22,000 agricultural journals with complete information about each journal (ISSN, start date, frequency, publisher…).
- The AGRIS centers dataset, which contains information about data providers, thus the AGRIS source of information.
The external datasets which OpenAGRIS is currently linking to are:
- World Bank
- FAO Country Profiles
- FAO fisheries dataset
- GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility)
- Interlinking OpenAGRIS to other datasets
- Crawling the Web to automatically extract triples and reach at least the threshold of 1 billion triples