How Agricultural Digital Innovation Can Benefit from Semantics: The Case of the AGROVOC Multilingual Thesaurus

AGROVOC is the multilingual thesaurus managed and published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Its content is available in more than 40 languages and covers all the FAO’s areas of interest. The structural basis is a resource description framework (RDF) and simple knowledge organization system (SKOS). More than 39,000 concepts identified by a uniform resource identifier (URI) and 800,000 terms are related through a hierarchical system and aligned to knowledge organization systems. This paper aims to illustrate the recent developments in the context of AGROVOC and to present use cases where it has contributed to enhancing the interoperability of data shared by different information systems.

Addressing the Challenges of Interoperability and Cultural Heritage Data

One of the ongoing challenges for effective utilization of heritage science data is the lack of access to well-organized and accessible extant data sets and the need to structure data in formats that allow interrogation and integration of related data. This need for data fusion expands to both subjective and objective measurements and descriptors, as well as a long-overdue need for established guidelines for metadata and shared terminologies, or more critically, ontologies. Research into this area has shown the need for Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) that bridge and integrate multiple ontologies that address specific needs – for example the Getty Vocabularies for cultural heritage terms, the Linked Art model for a simplified core CIDOC-CRM, as well as the OBO Foundry and other scientific ontologies for measurements and heritage science terminology.[1]

ISO 21526 Conform Metadata Editor for FAIR Unicode SKOS Thesauri

Metadata repositories are an indispensable component of data integration infrastructures and support semantic interoperability between knowledge organization systems. Standards for metadata representation like the ISO/IEC 11179 as well as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) by the World Wide Web Consortium were published to ensure metadata interoperability, maintainability and sustainability. The FAIR guidelines were composed to explicate those aspects in four principles divided in fifteen sub-principles. The ISO/IEC 21526 standard extends the 11179 standard for the domain of health care and mandates that SKOS be used for certain scenarios. In medical informatics, the composition of health care SKOS classification schemes is often managed by documentalists and data scientists. They use editors, which support them in producing comprehensive and valid metadata. Current metadata editors either do not properly support the SKOS resource annotations, require server applications or make use of additional databases for metadata storage. These characteristics are contrary to the application independency and versatility of raw Unicode SKOS files, e.g. the custom text arrangement, extensibility or copy & paste editing. We provide an application that adds navigation, auto completion and validity check capabilities on top of a regular Unicode text editor.

Ontologies in Knowledge Organization

Within the knowledge organization systems (KOS) set, the term “ontology” is paradigmatic of the terminological ambiguity in different typologies. Contributing to this situation is the indiscriminate association of the term “ontology”, both as a specific type of KOS and as a process of categorization, due to the interdisciplinary use of the term with different meanings. We present a systematization of the perspectives of different authors of ontologies, as representational artifacts, seeking to contribute to terminological clarification. Focusing the analysis on the intention, semantics and modulation of ontologies, it was possible to notice two broad perspectives regarding ontologies as artifacts that coexist in the knowledge organization systems spectrum. We have ontologies viewed, on the one hand, as an evolution in terms of complexity of traditional conceptual systems, and on the other hand, as a system that organizes ontological rather than epistemological knowledge. The focus of ontological analysis is the item to model and not the intentions that motivate the construction of the system.

Competências e habilidades digitais requeridas aos profissionais da informação nos anúncios brasileiros de emprego na web

We analyze online job ads to identify the digital competences that companies and organizations demand from information professionals. This information is obtained from a content analysis of online job ads. Their retrieval from the web is terminological, and specialists select ads that include knowledge, activities, or requirements related to information science and digital transformation. After the ad format is standardized, the ads are analyzed using an ad hoc taxonomy for categorization. The taxonomy and the corpus of the ads are compared using automatized XML files in Apache Solr. Based on the taxonomy, we approach the text of the ads. The obtained data are stored as CSV files, from which we generate the general and specific groups of knowledge. The results are displayed according to classes of knowledge and professional profiles, focusing on those that relate to digital transformation. We explain the activity branches and the transversal informatics knowledge of the companies offering the positions. The specific knowledge in the digital environment is then presented, interpreted, and grouped according to the ads’ most characteristic facets: digital objects, data banks; digital services; data analysis; knowledge banks and artificial intelligence; software; knowledge organization systems (KSO); rights and values; and web and portals. These facets are distinguished by their frequency and by the transformations they generate in professional activities. We conclude by considering the appearance of profiles that are quite removed from traditional denominations and activities, as well as considering the effects of digital transformation in a highly complex labor market and on the development of digital competences.

Effectiveness of Reference Models for Knowledge Organization Systems

This chapter intends to study reference models for the development of knowledge organization systems (KOS) to evaluate their effectiveness and their modeling capacity through a comparison of requirements. The tools for the development of technological knowledge management systems that will be compared are Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS), Modular Requirements for Records Systems (MoReq), and The Digital Library Reference Model. Through a comparative analysis of these instruments, it is proposed to evaluate and compare their main requirements. The planning of technological systems based on these standards/requirements brings guarantees of a correct use of classifications, thesauri, ontologies, among other types of KOS. They also promote their configuration in technological systems and regarding the business processes in which these technological systems are used.