AFITA 2006

FIFTH CONFERENCE OF AFITA

 

SEVENTH AGRICULTURAL ONTOLOGY SERVICE (AOS) WORKSHOP ON

ONTOLOGY-BASED KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY: USING METADATA AND ONTOLOGIES FOR IMPROVING ACCESS TO AGRICULTURAL INFORMATION

IN COLLABORATION WITH THE FIFTH CONFERENCE OF THE ASIAN FEDERATION

FOR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN AGRICULTURAL (AFITA - 2006)

BANGALORE, INDIA

9-10 NOVEMBER 2006

INTRODUCTION

 

The goal of the Seventh AOS workshop is to provide a platform for implementers to demonstrate how ontologies can extract and acquire additional knowledge from existing agricultural information systems.  It aims to bring together research communities, with special focus on agriculture, whose members are interested in efficiently capturing knowledge and in creating representations and formalizations that can be useful for reasoning and knowledge discovery. 

 

The topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

· Automatic and semi-automatic metadata generation

· Decision-support tools

· Knowledge acquisition methods

· Knowledge elicitation techniques

· Knowledge extraction techniques

· Knowledge representation techniques (in ontologies)

· Metadata and accurate knowledge mark-up

· Ontology application

· Ontology learning

· Ontology life cycle

· Ontology modelling

· Question-answering systems

· Rules in ontologies

 

Background

The benefits of ontologies can only be fully exploited if they are used efficiently within information systems for extraction or discovery of ‘embedded’ knowledge.  In today’s exponentially growing information world, there is a mounting need to extract the most important information in the shortest possible time. It has become vital to have systems that are able to provide the most relevant results, while sieving through mushrooming information systems, websites, publications, forums, blogs etc.   Although cataloguing and indexing resources are important steps, it is becoming increasingly difficult to accomplish these tasks due to the lack of skilled personnel, the cost of cataloguing and the rapid growth of the available information resources.

Considerable work has been done to date in the area of knowledge capture through the use of subject and process ontologies in the agricultural domain. The AOS project covers, under its name, ontologies on Food and Nutrition, Food Safety, Animal and Plant Health, Fisheries, etc., each of which captures knowledge in a specific domain area of agriculture. The complete multilingual AGROVOC Thesaurus, in the process of being made available in the form of an ontology, is rich with translations, synonyms and relations.  All of these ontologies have been used in information systems to provide improved access to information. However, much of this can be further enhanced through the efficient use of ontologies for extracting the unknown and hidden pieces of knowledge, not only for providing efficient search results to the users but also for iteratively improving the ontology itself. We can achieve this only through the explicit formalization of domain knowledge through its elicitation from experts and by linking the ontologies to actual or instance data.

 

The activities of the AOS initiative are documented at: http://www.fao.org/aims

 

Important dates:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paper submission:

All papers should be written in English.  Electronic version (MS Word) of the paper should be uploaded via: http://caitian.cn:7001/lianong/en/send.jsp

 

Publication:

Accepted papers will be published within the AFITA 20006 conference proceedings. At least one author of an accepted paper must register for the AFITA 2006 conference before the deadline for camera-ready copies of the papers (26 June 2006). Otherwise the paper will not be published.

 

Workshop programme committee:

à Howard Beck, University of Florida, USA

à Jayantha Chaterjee, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India

à Johannes Keizer, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Italy

à Gauri Salokhe, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Italy

à Dagobert Soergel, University of Maryland, USA

à Zhong Wang, Guangdong Academy of Agricultural Sciences, China

 

PROGRAMME SCHEDULE

 

DAY-1                     Date:       Thursday, November 9, 2006 (see AFITA 2006 programme)

                                  Venue: Indian Institute of Science Hall A

 

DAY-2                     Date:       Friday, November 10, 2006

                                  Venue: Indian Institute of Science

 

8:00-9:00                Breakfast

 

Session I: Welcome speech and Introductions

 

9:00-9:30                The Agricultural Ontology Service and its vision

Johannes Keizer, Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO, Italy)

 

9:30-10:00              Introduction of participants

 

 

                                  Session II: Knowledge acquisition methods

10:00-10:30            Rough Set based Decision Tree for Identifying Vulnerable and Food Insecure Households

Rajni Jain, NCAP, Pusa, New Delhi (India)

 

10:30-11:00            Tea Break and Poster viewing

 

11:00-11:30            Organizing and Implementing on the Thesauri Mapping Project

-     Chang Chun, Agricultural Information Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS, China)

 

                                  Session III: Knowledge acquisition methods (continued)

 

11:30-12:00            The OWL model for comprehensive knowledge acquisition 

Johannes Keizer, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO, Italy)

 

12:00-12:30            Ontology development and use for efficient information input and retrieval

Augustine, Monsanto Research Center, Bangalore, India; & Monsanto, Creve Coeur, St. Louis, USA.

 

13:00-14:00            Lunch and Photo session

 

                                  Session IV: Ontology Applications

 

14:00-14:30            Ontology-Based Agricultural Scientific Data Integration in OGSA-DAI Environment

-    Man Guo, China Academy of Agriculture Science

 

14:30-15:00            Incorporating ARGOVOC in DSpace-based Agricultural Repositories

Devika P. Madalli, Documentation and Research Training Centre of  Indian Statistical

 

15:00-15:30            Dynamic Integrations of Crop Data and Corresponding Meteorological Data based on a Standardised Data Exchange Framework.

Seishi Ninomiya, Atsushi Yamakawa and Xinwen Yu (JAPAN)

 

15:30-16:00            Tea Break and Poster viewing

 

16:00-16:30            OntoViz: Visualizing Ontologies and Thesauri Using Layout Algorithms

-       Prabhakar T.V, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (India)

 

16:30-17:00            Networked Ontology Project for Fisheries Alert System

-     Gauri Salokhe, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO, Italy)

 

17:00-17:30            Designing the Team-oriented Ontology Management System with Ajax Technology

-     Ze Li The Institute of Sci-Tech Information, Guangdong Academy of Agricultural Sciences (GDAAS-IST), China

 

17:30-18:00            Heuristic Approach for Automatic Metadata Capture of E-books

-     ARD Prasad, Documentation and Research Training Centre of Indian Statistical Institute

 

20:00-21:30            Dinner

 

 

Day-3                       Date:       Saturday, November 11, 2006 (see AFITA 2006 programme)

                                  Venue: Indian Institute of Science Hall A

 

8:00-9:00                Breakfast

 

Session I: The AOS workbench and further collaboration

 

9:00-9:30                Examples of FAO ontology applications