The NeOn project
The "NeOn - Lifecycle support for networked ontologies" project is a 14.7 million Euros project, involving 14 European partners, and is part of the European Commission, Sixth Framework Programme, Priority 2, "Information Society Technologies".
The aim of NeOn is to advance the state of the art in using ontologies for large-scale semantic applications in distributed organizations; and to create the first ever service-oriented, open infrastructure, and associated methodology, to support the development life-cycle of this new generation of semantic applications with economically viable solutions.
FAO case study overview
 FAO's role in the project is to implement a case study: the Fish Stock Depletion Assessment System applying NeOn technologies and methodologies, with the goal of improving the management of the complexity of fishery knowledge communities.
 The
effective management of shared fish stocks is one of the great challenges
facing the way towards achieving long-term sustainable fisheries. Fisheries
department has several information and knowledge organization systems
to facilitate and secure the long-term sustainable development and utilization
of the world's fisheries and aquaculture. Although much of the data are
'structured', they are not necessarily interoperable. Additionally, there
are information resources that are not available through databases but
are available as parts of websites as individual documents, images, etc.
These data sources could be better exploited by bringing together related
and relevant information, along with the use of the fishery ontology,
to provide inference-based services, language independent extraction and
discovery for policy makers and national governments to make informed
decisions.
Progress and results
Since the project started, in March 2006, FAO?s work package has progressed a lot and produced a number of results. Those include two deliverables about the user requirements for the case study and an extensive inventory of resources to be used in it; as well as the first set of fisheries ontologies for the case study.
Deliverables:
Ontologies:
 This
first set of ontologies are the cornerstones to build the network that would
allow to extract, analyze and aggregate data and information needed for the
FSDAS. Most of these ontologies have been populated from Fisheries databases.
Land areas
This ontology organizes land areas at national level or group (geographic or economic) level. This information is important since most fisheries statistics are reported by individual or groups of countries.
Fishing areas
This ontology organizes the FAO division areas for marine and inland waters, which are useful for statistical data collection and reporting. The division of water areas forms a strict and complete hierarchy.
Biological entities
This ontology manages reference data about biological species needed for fisheries fact sheets and statistical information, among other resources. Species items are organized and maintained in the Aquatic Science and Fisheries Information System (ASFIS) and currently includes nearly 11.000 species items related to Fisheries and Aquaculture.
Fisheries commodities
Fisheries commodities cover products derived from any aquatic animal (fish, crustaceans, molluscs) as well as residues for commercial, industrial or subsistence uses; fished in inland, fresh and brackish waters, in inshore, offshore or high seas fishing areas.
Various classification systems are available for fisheries commodities: FAO's
International Standard Statistical Classification of Fishery Commodities (ISSCFC)
which is an expansion of the United
Nations Standard International Trade Classification (SITC); and the Harmonized
Commodity Description and Coding System maintained by theWorld Customs
Organization (WCO).
The fisheries commodities ontology manages all information
necessary to use these classifications together.
Vessel types and size
This ontology organizes the information necessary to assess fleet capacity and vessel main characteristics, such as its size or lenght. The ontology includes information form classifications used for vessel size, the Gross Register Tonnage (GRT), as defined by the Oslo Convention (1947); and the Gross Tonnage (GT) as defined by the 1969 London Convention.
Gear types
This ontology manages reference data about gear types needed for the fisheries fact sheets.
The type of gear installed on a vessel determines the type of fish that it
can catch and therefore it is often used to determine the fleet power. The main
classification of gear types is the International
Standard Statistical Classification of Fishing Gear (ISSCFG). Although
this classification was initially designed to improve the compilation of harmonised
catch and effort data and in fish stock assessment exercises, it has also been
found to be very useful for fisheries technology, fishermen training and for
the preparation of specialized catalogues on artisanal and industrial fishing
methods.
Fisheries Fact sheets ontology
FAO publishes factsheets containing a large amount of information about fisheries. Factsheets are organized into domains such as Aquaculture species, Fishing equipment, and Gear type.
All fact sheets are XML documents, structured according to a comprehensive XML schema that includes all XML elements used in all types of fact sheets. Each domain corresponds to an element of the schema. A dictionary of the elements used in the schema is available online.
The schema makes use of existing standard element sets such as Dublin Core, Extended Dublin Core, AGMES and AIDA. It also incorporates existing international classification schemes for fisheries-related entities.
Next deliverables
By the end of August 2007 three deliverables were finalized and the documents will be publicly available and linked from this web site soon. Those deliverables are:
- D7.2.2. Revised and enhanced Fisheries ontologies
- D7.4.1. Software architecture for managing the fishery ontologies lifecycle
- D7.5.1. Software architecture for the ontology-based Fisheries Stock Depletion Alert System (FSDAS)
In addition by the end of 2007 another two deliverables will be concluded and published here as soon as this is possible:
- D7.3.1. Results from the experiments on ontology learning and population applied to the Fisheries domain (including evaluation and recommendations). Due by October 2007.
- D7.1.2. Revised specifications of user requirements and use cases. Due by December 2007.
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