Smart organization of agricultural knowledge : the example of the AGROVOC Concept Server and Agropedia

The tendency of representing information in a form that could be better elaborated by computers (the so called “machine readable format”) (Berners-Lee 1998) initiated years ago, expanded to many domains, among which Agriculture. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, The Kasetsart University and the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur are pioneers in the representation of information and knowledge related to this domain using modern techniques such as ontology languages. This paper analyzes a couple of projects developed by these organizations, aiming to make use of a concept-oriented approach while describing agricultural topics. It is organized in two chapters each referred to each project, describing in particular the innovative aspects, the benefits, and the technology used.