AGROVOC and the NAL Agricultural Thesaurus at the

Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative

Willem Robert van HageTNO Industrie & Techniek /

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

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Overview

• AGROVOC & NALT• the Goal

– federated access to heterogeneous data sources

• the Method– align the ontologies– the OAEI workshop (2006 and 2007)

• a challenge for ontology alignment researchers• an opportunity for environmental researchers

AGROVOC & NALT

• AGROVOC 28.000 descriptor terms 10.000 non-descriptor terms– ten languages (currently 17 and another 4 under construction)

– used to index AGRIS/CARIS (and other resources)

• NALT 41.000 descriptor terms 24.000 non-descriptor terms,– english (currently also spanish)

– used to index AGRICOLA, FSRIO, AgNIC, NALDR (and other resources)

AGROVOC & NALT

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AGROVOC NALT

AGROVOC NALT

AGRICOLAFSRIOAgNICNALDR

AGRIS/CARIS

wheat aphids

wheat aphid, RussianUSE: Diuraphis noxia

Diuraphis noxia麦双尾蚜

麦双尾蚜

Diuraphis noxiaDiuraphis

noxia

the Goal

• OAEI 2006– A friendly competition between scientists– Six ontology alignment tasks:

benchmark, anatomy, conference, directory, jobs, and AGROVOC-NALT

• OAEI 2006 AGROVOC-NALT– Five participants: Falcon-AO, PRIOR, RiMOM, COMA++, HMatch

• The systems align the SKOS version of the ontologies without manual intervention.

• The set of alignments (around 10.000 per participant) are collected and samples are judged by experts(FAO, USDA and AI researchers at the EKAW conference)

• The results are published at:http://www.few.vu.nl/~wrvhage/oaei2006

the Method - OAEI

OAEI 2006 - performance81%

50%

83%

46%

71%

45%

54%

23%

61%

46%

RiMOM

Falcon-AO

Prior

COMA++

HMatch

Precision Recall

OAEI 2006 - conclusions• Alignments that are easy to automate:

– High consensus topics such as:• Latin species names (rigid Linnaeic naming scheme)

• Some geographical names• Parts of the medical domain (parts of anatomy and diseases)

• Alignments that are hard to automate:– Low consensus topics such as:

• Different notations of chemicals(e.g. caffeine vs. theine vs. 1,3,7-trimethyl-1H-purine-2,6(3H,7H)-dione)

• Some other geographical names(e.g. time dependency or administrative vs. physical)

• Products and processes• Concepts that are culturally dependant

(e.g. law and economy)

• OAEI 2007– at ISWC 2007

in Busan, Korea, november 11th– again AGROVOC-NALT (did things improve?)– but also AGROVOC-GEMET, NALT-GEMET

• AGROVOC-NALT– Falcon-AO, PRIOR+, DSSim, RiMOM

• AGROVOC-GEMET, NALT-GEMET– Falcon-AO, PRIOR+, DSSim

• Deadlines – submission of results: october 1st– evaluation of results: november 11th

• More information can be found at:http://www.few.vu.nl/~wrvhage/oaei2007

OAEI 2007

References

• AGROVOC:http://www.fao.org/agrovoc

• NALT:http://agclass.nal.usda.gov/agt

• GEMEThttp://www.eionet.europa.eu/gemet/

• OAEI 2007:http://oaei.ontologymatching.org/2007

• OAEI 2007:http://www.few.vu.nl/~wrvhage/oaei2007

• OAEI 2006 results:http://www.few.vu.nl/~wrvhage/oaei2006