AGRORAMA: A proof-of-concept for making use of the Semantic Mediawiki power for the agro-community!

1. Agrorama
Hacking around Semantic Mediawiki
for the agro-community
Nikos Manolis
Tasos Koutoumanos
AgroKnow Technologies
www.agroknow.gr
Green Hackathon
Athens, Dec 14-16 2012
www.greenhackathon.com

2. The opportunity
● Greeks feel the urge to become (real) farmers
again!
● They consider working with new plants and
crops!
● They do it all over the country, in big and small
fields, on the mountains, by the sea, in the sea!
● They want to integrate technology in their
business!
● They consider organic and sustainable methods!

3. Some threats
● Farmers are working disconnected from
each other.
● New farmers cannot draw on existing
experience.
● New methods and crops don't allow for big
communities.
● Knowledge related to farming is tacit by
nature.

4. The motivation
An interesting site for farmers of
“sea-berry” or “seabuckthor” or
“hippophae” or AgroVoc-15770 :-)
Very difficult to maintain, the
manager of the site needs to collect
descriptions, edit them and publish
them one-by-one...

5. An idea for hacking
● Bring-in knowledge with a more efficient
way
● Make this information more meaningful
● Allow for more links between information
● Give semantics to these links!
hack it easy!
choose the route of least effort

6. MediaWiki
● Powering WIKIPEDIA
▪ Almost all of us have used it for viewing
information
▪ Some have used it for providing or editing
information
● Open Source, very well supported
● Easy to deploy, easy to use
● Light on resources, especially on the client
side – old browsers, mobile interfaces, etc.

7. Semantic MediaWiki
● Wikis - a great tool for collecting
and sharing knowledge.
● But, they are less useful for
getting queried or aggregated information.
As a simple example, consider the
following question:
▪ «What are common problems for sea-berries
farms by the sea, during October?»

8. A short demo...

9. What's next - milestones
M1: Wiki is used mainly for collecting
knowledge. The web manager then
publishes it on the web site
M2:​ Connect to the LOD cloud
M3: Wiki is also used for sharing knowledge
M4: Web services allow for interesting
representations of data
M5: More social features for the community