This year the 4th International Workshop on Metadata and Semantics for Agriculture, Food and Environment was hosted as a special track of MTSR 2011 bringing together researchers and practitioners that are working on agricultural, food-related and environmental knowledge production, organization, and exchange from a Semantic Web perspective. It was organized by Ioannis N. Athanasiadis, Democritus University of Thrace (Greece),  Nikos Manouselis, University of Alcala (Spain) and Agro-Know Technologies (Greece) and Johannes Keizer, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (Italy).

The session included the following papers:

• Agriculture-Related Concepts in Non-agricultural and General Thesauri by Tomaz Bartol
• Publishing and Linking Semantically Annotated Agro-environmental Resources to LOD with AGROPub by Sasa Nesic et al.
• Thesaurus Maintenance, Alignment and Publication as Linked Data: The AGROOVOC Use Case by Caterina Caracciolo et al.
• Subject Classification with DITA Markup for Agricultural Learning Resources. A Case Example in Agroforestry by Thomas Zschocke
• Intellectual Property Rights in Environmental and Natural History Collections: A
  
  Preliminary Discussion by Effie Tsiflidou et al.
• Developing a Metadata Application Profile for Sharing Agricultural Scientific and
  
  Scholarly Research Resources by Nikos Diamantopoulos et al.
• Introducing a Content Integration Process for a Federation of Agricultural Institutional
  
  Repositories by Vassilios Protonotarios et al.
• POWDER as Enabling Technology for the Semantic Interoperability of Agricultural
  
  Repositories by Pythagoras Karampiperis et al.
• A Model for Skills and Competences and Its Application in the Agricultural Sector by Simon Grant et al.

The 4th International Workshop on Metadata and Semantics for Agriculture, Food and Environment proceedings have been published in Vol.240 of the CCIS Series.