1) 18 years of work on metadata and semantics in agriculture has led to several achievements, including widespread acceptance of the importance of semantics, communities like Agroportal and GACS not led by FAO alone, and demonstrators showing what linked open data can deliver. 2) However, the semantic web community has not strongly influenced mainstream applications, except for Drupal. The business case for semantics may not be strong enough due to a lack of tangible benefits shown to users. 3) Continued work on semantics is still needed and should involve community building, pragmatic approaches, developing data infrastructure plans, and influencing productivity tools to realize the potential value of open agricultural data.

1. 18 years of engagement for metadata and semantics in
Agriculture: was it worth the effort
Dr. rer. nat. Johannes Keizer, Goettingen, 2016-11-24

15. What we achieved really
• No one denies the importants of semantics
anymore, Ontologies everywhere
• Agroportal and GACS .. community not FAO alone
• The VocBench (a nice piece of open Source
software)
• The AGRIS LOD application is a powerful
demonstrator, what LOD can deliver
• Other important experiements: A prototype of a
dataset registry (CIARD RING), Agriprofiles
• Conceptual framework
• and most important!

16. http://aims.fao.org

17. Community

18. SEMANTICS ON THE
WEB
Looking around

19. The semantic web
The 2001 Scientific American article by Berners-Lee, Hendler,
and Lassila described an expected evolution of the existing
Web to a Semantic Web.[5] In 2006, Berners-Lee and
colleagues stated that: "This simple idea…remains largely
unrealized".[6] In 2013, more than four million Web domains
contained Semantic Web markup.[7]
According to the Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief the total
number of registered domain names is 284 million, an
increase over the January 2014 figure of 265 million

21. BUT WHAT DOES IT
MEAN IN PRACTICE?
The cloud gets bigger

22. What application do you mostly use?
• Evernote
• Google Suite
• Dropbox
• Economist
• Amazon
• Drupal
• Facebook

23. Semantics in Evernote
Existent! But Kind of ridiculous
• Simple tagging system
• No polyhierarachy allowed
(poly hierarchy is one of the
most real events )
• No relations between tags
• Useless inheritance features

24. Google Suite
• The same charme as normal google
search
• Have you created and used categories
in Gmail?
• Why not even auto categorization?
• «Add recipients» most useful feature
• Google Drive still uses mostly the
concept of physical folders
• Most effort into displaying adds

25. Amazon
The most intelligent app
They mostly get it
• Artificial Intelligence behind
• Analyzing reading habits
• But the possibilities would
be enormous
– Think about
autocategorization and
linking of your notes
• But: closed shop

26. Dropbox

27. Drupal
Drupal has modules that allow
to
:
• expose internal data as RDF;
• expose internal data through a SPARQL
engine;
• dynamically query remote RDF stores through
a SPARQL client;
• execute dynamic SPARQL queries and store
resulting triples as nodes according to a pre-
defined mapping
 Linked Data

28. Economist

29. Facebook

30. EXCEPT IN THE CASE OF DRUPAL
THE SEMANTIC WEB COMMUNITY
HAS NOT REALLY INFLUENCED
MAIN STREAM APPLICATIONS
Conclusions

31. BUSINESS CASE NOT
STRONG ENOUGH?
Why?

32. “… research suggests that seven sectors alone could
generate more than $3 trillion a year in additional value
as a result of open data, which is already giving rise to
hundreds of entrepreneurial businesses and helping
established companies to segment markets …”
Source: McKinsey Global Institute
"Making these data public will allow people to
make their own assessments of the progress of
our Good Growth Plan. It is also blurring the
traditional roles of business, government and
NGOs by highlighting our collective
responsibility to address acute global
challenges. Above all, the data will be of value
to farmers, enabling them to increase
productivity sustainably and to enhance their
livelihoods."
"Open data has the power to solve our most
challenging sustainability problems. … Agri-
tech businesses have a big role to play in
finding novel solutions to these problems. …
Syngenta is taking a step that puts them at
the forefront of the open data movement in
their sector. We look forward to working with
them to unlock benefits for farmers and
consumers worldwide."
Mike Mack, CEO of Syngenta
(2015, for 1st GGP data release)
Jeni Tennison, Deputy CEO and CTO of
the Open Data Institute
Now there is big data Hype

34. Paradigm Shift for research
• In the past
– 80% data production, 20% data
evaluatio
• In the future
– 20% data production, 80% data
evaluation

35. We have GODAN
• Advocacy
• Think Tank
• Knowledge Network

38. Aggregation States of Knowledge

39. Data and Information in Agricultural Research and Extension

40. Dataset
Registries
Data
processingSemantics
LOD Generator
triplifier,
concept and entity
identifier
Data Services
Webservices + APIs to
data stores
Data Storage
Infrastructure elements for FAIR data

41. THE FAIR PRINCIPLE
resources need to be
Findable
Accessible
Interoperable
Reusable
= FAIR
FAIR principle by Barend Mons, EC, EOSC

42. Data Issues
http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v43/n4/full/ng0411-281.html

43. Going on!
• Semantics are needed
• Community Building is Prime necessity-
Chania Group
• Pragmatism in approach, avoiding over
commitment
• Developing plans for a data infrastructure
• Riding the big data tiger
• Influencing mainstream productivity tools

45. eRosa