The Concept Server as the first step towards an "Ontology Service"

Ontology is a new concept that is emerging from the various Semantic Web initiatives, which roughly speaking can be defined as a semantic system that contains terms, the definitions of those terms, and the specification of relationships among those terms. Such a semantic system can be referred to as an "Ontology Service".

Moving towards a concept server

In order to create a Concept Server (CS) using AGROVOC as the starting point, it is necessary to restructure it from the current term-based system to a concept-based system. Moreover, the traditional thesaurus relationships are over generalized and need to be refined.

We have identified a number of basic relationships that will be used in the CS.

Standardized format for terminologies and vocabularies

Currently, we are considering a number of formats for representing the AGROVOC thesaurus. The first step towards realizing the AGROVOC CS is the representation of the thesaurus in RDF-based formats that can increase the interoperability of the thesaurus and that are serialized for the Web (see picture below):

Eventually, the current database system will be maintained only for backwards compatibility. Terminology development will occur directly within an OWL-based system, a description logic-based representation format in which concepts, terms and strings are well defined. In addition, mappings with other terminologies will also be made available through this web site.

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Learn more about ontologies by browsing: Ontology Flyer