On June 13 and 14, during the International Smartagrimatics Conference a workshop on "Semantic Web and Ontologies in Agrifood". The AIMs team (Johannes Keizer) gave a presentation with the title "Creating Knowledge Bases by annotating large amounts of unstructured data using RDF triples and the AGROVOC concept scheme - the agHARVEST project" . The workshop showed that now the time for a bigger linked open data initiative in Agriculture is mature. An impressive presentation was given by Philippe Loopuyt, the Unit head of IT in the EC DG SANCO (Health and Consumers). They are preparing to publish all their data as Linked open data in RDF among those Pesticides MRLs. Also the German agroXML initiative is now transferring the agroXML vocabulary in RDF (see picture). 5 presentations among 8 cited in one way to the other AGROVOC. AGROVOC is a point of reference in the semantic work in agriculture, but also problems as a lack of coverage were discussed.

During the workshop discussion the request for a registry of vocabularies and a registry of dataservices came up, what was a good opportunity for me to show the VEST registry and the CIARD RING.  I think the AIMS team has to invest in both to make it the reference point for Agricultural information services.

Some snippets from the conference are at http://www.flickr.com/photos/johanneskeizer/sets/72157630132373504/. All presentations will be published soon.