Uses and Needs of Semantic Resources in the Area of Agriculture

This document reports on the second step taken by the Agrisemantics Working Group towards the definition of recommendations for future e-infrastructures to support semantic resources (SR) in agriculture. “Semantic resources” in this context refers to “...structures of varying nature, complexity and formats used for the purpose of expressing the “meaning” of data",1 be those textual or numeric. Controlled vocabularies, value lists, classification systems, glossaries, thesauri, and ontologies are all example of semantic resources. They may be expressed in a variety of formats, open or proprietary, machine-readable or not. This broad definition then includes both the “vocabularies” as defined by W3C2 (i.e., including metadata elements and value vocabularies, aka knowledge organization systems), and ontologies, be those lightweight or with richer descriptions and logical axioms. We prefer to distinguish the content and use of SRs (e.g., thesauri for indexing or classification systems) from their formats (e.g., relational format, RDF or OWL), to avoid the sometimes misleading equivalence between the formats used to express and make resources available, and the semantic content (and purpose) of the resource itself.