Towards an Infrastructure for Semantic Applications: Methodologies for Semantic Integration of Heterogeneous Resources

The semantic heterogeneity of Web information in the Agricultural domain presents tremendous information retrieval challenges. This article presents work taking place at the Food and Agriculture Organizations (FAO) that addresses this challenge. Based on the analysis of resources in the domain of agriculture, this paper proposes (a) an application profile (AP) for dealing with the problem of heterogeneity originating from differences in terminologies, domain coverage, and domain modelling, and (b) a root application ontology (AAO) based on the application profile which can serve as a basis for extending knowledge of the domain. The paper explains how even a small investment in the enhancement of relationships among vocabularies, both metadata and domain-specific, yield a relatively large return on investment. doi:10.1300/J104v43n03_10