AGRIS runs in the "LinkedUp Vidi Competition"!

AGRIS has submitted its brief (see below) for the LinkedUp Vidi Competition. The Veni, Vidi and Vici competitions are explained here.

***AGRIS Submission****

AGRIS (International System for Agricultural Science and Technology) is a database with more than 7.7 million structured bibliographical records on agricultural science and technology. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and its technical partner AgroKnow maintains the AGRIS database. AGRIS content comes from 150 participating institutions dotted across 65 countries. In recent months, AGRIS has also been accepting content from publishers related to agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, aquatic sciences, fisheries and nutrition. Some of the records received have a link to the full text and AGRIS becomes an indexer to the respective repositories. AGRIS data is indexed in Google Scholar (since 2008), and this offers greater visibility of AGRIS content. These records are made available via the AGRIS portal which is a web application that links AGRIS records to related web resources using the Linked Open Data methodology.

AGRIS is an RDF-aware system, a mash up application that allows users to query the AGRIS content, interlink all resources to external sources of information. The linkages are made possible by the use of AGROVOC, a multilingual vocabulary containing more than 40,000 concepts available in more than 21 languages. AGROVOC itself is published as LOD and is part of the LOD cloud. As stated earlier, AGRIS data consumption is comprised of centralisation of data collected from data providers and then interlinking this data with other kinds of information related to the bibliographic records in AGRIS and the AGRIS domain. These kinds of information include maps, statistics, and country profile information. AGRIS accept any input format. In brief the RDF-ization process included the translation of AGRIS AP XML database into RDF and the selection of the external datasets to be interlinked to AGRIS. In the transition to RDF, each AGRIS record is assigned a unique permanent URI. Other URIs included are for AGROVOC keywords and AGRIS Journals. To assure provenance, each AGRIS records has a unique identifier (ARN) with a predefined structure and contains implicit information about the data source and year of creation. To enable the interlinking two approaches have been used first, using AGROVOC formal alignments to other thesauri (skos:exactMatch, skos:closeMatch) and secondly, querying external webservices with specific names extracted AGROVOC key words and this is enabled by simple java programming.

In summary to interlink,
  • Use AGROVOC as the backborne,
  • Align AGROVOC to other thesauri,
  • Discover SQARQL endpoints,
  • Discover webservices and APIs ,
  • Write the code and interlink