The first webinar as part of the Research Data Alliance Interest Group for Agricultural Data (IGAD)’s new Coffee Break initiative took place on 16 June with more than 50 participants. The webinar, titled "Aligning AGROVOC and Ontologies to connect semantics to improve Agrifood data annotation and interoperability" featured Pier Luigi Buttigieg, Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration/GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research and inspired great dialogue between the participants and presenter during the final 15-minute Q&A session. 

Throughout the webinar, Pier Luigi Buttigie answered the question of whether it would be a good idea to semantically connect AGROVOC, FAO agricultural multilingual thesaurus, with complementary ontologies. 

“Is it worth it?” Pier Luigi said, “Yes, it is worth it, because thesauri and ontologies do different things, they have different jobs.”

The next webinar as part of the RDA/IGAD Coffee Break Initiative entitled “Agricultural market dynamics based on data evidence”  and featuring Luiza Petrosyan, Universitat Politécnica de Valencia will take place on 30 June from 13:00 to 13:30 CEST.  Registration is available now.