AGRIS shortlisted in the "LinkedUp Vici Competition"!

The LinkedUp Vici Competition is the last competition on tools and demos that use open data for educational purposes. AGRIS ran the competition and was shortlisted: it will be presented during the workshop “Learning and Education with the Web of Data“, collocated with ISWC 2014, the International Semantic Web Conference 2014 (19-23 October in Riva del Garda – Trentino, Italy).

For more information about the competition and all shortlisted submissions, you can browse the linkedup blog. You can also vote for AGRIS in the Vici People's Choice Web page.

 “Even though the AGRIS application displays a lot of information in a single page, it is still easy to use”, according to one reviewer.

DESCRIPTION OF THE AGRIS WEB PORTAL

AGRIS is currently defined as the International System for Agricultural Science and Technology. So, it is not only about agricultural science, but also technology. It is a bibliographic database, collecting metadata from every side of the world, in many different languages: AGRIS can rely on over 150 data providers located in more than 100 different countries. It focuses on grey literature (thesis, etc.) and small publishers, as well as big publishers: AGRIS disseminates a collection of more than 7.7 million bibliographic references in agriculture through the AGRIS Web portal (http://agris.fao.org), which is one of the most visited Web site in agriculture, with peaks of 250,000 visits/month from more than 200 countries and territories (according to Google Analytics).

Since December 2013, AGRIS completely exposes its database as Linked Open Data (LOD), with the ambition not to centralize all the information in agriculture, but to use LOD technologies and the latent knowledge in the AGRIS data to automatically find and display relevant information on the Internet. We believe that to improve agriculture in the world, we have to make information on agriculture globally available. By this view, AGRIS becomes the hub for agricultural research, a place where domain experts, researchers, librarians, information managers, Government officers, and everyone with an interest in agriculture can come to find and discover anything they might need, with good levels of precision and recall and a short response time. When the user is looking for a publication about a specific topic, the AGRIS system is able to discover and display in a “ mashup page” other information available on the Web and related to the same topic.

Let’ s try to understand what a mashup page is. Using the AGRIS Web portal, the user is able to browse the AGRIS bibliographic database, looking for information about a very specific topic in the AGRIS domain. When the user selects an AGRIS resource (i.e. a thesis, journal articles, conference proceedings, etc.), the system shows the mashup page, a page where the information about the AGRIS resource is provided together with other external information extracted on the fly by querying services over the Web. This process is made possible especially by the adoption of LOD methodologies in the AGRIS Web portal. In particular, AGRIS is currently providing access to very important external sources of information, like the Chinese Agricultural Sci-tech Documents Database (CASDD), the CGRIS germplasm database, the World Bank, Europeana, Bioversity International, Global Biodiversity Information Facility, International Food Policy Research Institute, etc. Sometimes, AGRIS is the only way to access such information sources!

An interesting example about multilinguality:

Some interesting examples of AGRIS mashup pages are:

agris mashup page