Ontologies and semantic technologies for agricultural knowledge in practice

The series of AOS workshops started in 2000, with the aim to start a discussion on how to use semantically-oriented technologies in general and ontologies in particular, to provide effective agricultural knowledge services and collaboration around the world. Standards, tools and services are in our focus since then. Ten years later, semantically technologies have taken over and ontologies and other knowledge organization systems are widely used for information management, also in agriculture.

The 2012 edition of the AOS workshop is concerned with works that address real-world problems by using semantic technologies in conjunction with any type of knowledge organization systems (KOS), for the management of agricultural information.We are interested in agriculture in the broad sense, including all areas related to the production of food for humans and animals alike. We encourage the submission of works discussing applications dealing with structured and semi-structured information, including textual documents, geographical and statistical data. We are also interested in hearing about your work dealing with scalability and robustness of knowledge-based applications, privacy and provenance issues, and the evaluation of knowledge organization systems (KOS) in agriculture, and/or the evaluation of the their application in concrete scenarios. We encourage submissions discussing standard vocabularies and linked data applications in agriculture.

AOS 2012 is part of Knowledge Technology Week 2012 (KTW2012), which takes place in Kuching, Malaysia, on 3-7 September 2012. Collocated events include:

Conferences (5-6-7 September 2012):

• DC-2012 International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications
• PRICAI 2012 The 12th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence
• PRIMA 2012 The 15th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems

Workshops (3-4 September 2012):

• CIBL 2012 International Workshop on Collaboration and Intelligence in Blended Learning
• PKAW 2012 The 12th International Workshop on Knowledge Management and Acquisition for Intelligent Systems

Topics

Topics include but are not limited to:

Theory and Methodologies

• Modeling agricultural information as KOS
• Standard vocabularies in agricultural information
• Good and best practices for exploitation and dissemination of agricultural information
• Methodologies for semantic information organization and retrieval in agriculture
• Knowledge organization and discovery using ontologies
• Information retrieval and classification using ontologies and KOS
• Evaluations of semantic technologies in agriculture

Applications

• Exploiting agricultural information in information management systems and web environment
• Applications of AGROVOC thesaurus in to agricultural-related issues
• The design and implementation of Agricultural Ontology Concept Server
• Evaluation of ontologies and semantic technologies
• Web services for agricultural Knowledge
• Semantic Search, question answering and decision support system in agriculture
• Linked data publishing and consumption for agricultural information

Data and metadata

• Metadata for agricultural information
• Treatment of diverse types of data for agricultural applications
• Linking agricultural data and life science and environmental data

Important Dates

• Workshop Paper Due:  31st May 2012
• Notification of Paper Acceptance : 30th June 2012
• Camera-Ready Copy Due: 15th July 2012
• Workshop Day: 3rd- 4th September 2012