2017 Volume 26 Issue 2 Pages 27-33
We developed an ontology management tool for ontological information such as agricultural vocabularies, standard vocabularies, and agricultural ontologies with the goal of supporting interoperability of agricultural information (i.e., data sharing and retrieval). In this study, we collected information from general agricultural dictionaries and thesauruses, keyword lists from existing agriculture information systems, and standard vocabularies developed by governmental agencies. We converted the vocabularies to the resource description framework (RDF)–Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) to the RDF/SKOS format, and developed an ontology broker to register, update, and retrieve the collected agricultural vocabularies based on the Semantic MediaWiki engine. The ontology broker comprises a tool for manipulating sparse large-dimensional matrices to retrieve text through multiple agricultural thesauruses that have been combined to find associations among the vocabularies. We also developed a WebAPI tool to provide online access to the ontology broker. Our proposed approach will improve interoperability and management of agricultural information by taking advantage of the vocabularies.
