OpenAGRIS (19-03-2012)

N.B. OpenAGRIS was merged to AGRIS in December 2013. Now only the AGRIS system exists.

AGRIS is one of the most important world-wide information systems in the area of the agricultural sciences, containing more than 7 million of XML bibliographic records in the agricultural sector. These bibliographic records are manually created by cataloguers and sometimes suffer of lack of information, like the full text of a document. Specifically, only 3% of the entire collection has a full text link, so the user has to search Google to find the publication. Moreover, lack of information like connections with related work and related web resources makes impossible to interlink to other sources of data. Linked Data is the way to publish structured data and to interlink with other existing datasets, in a machine readable way: to overcome the lack of information of AGRIS records, it was necessary to convert the whole repository in RDF [a language for expressing data models using statements expressed as triples (subject, predicate, and object) and publishing it on the Web] and become part of the Linked Open Data cloud. Thus, more than 190 million triples were generated and used by OpenAgris, a web application that aggregates information from different Web sources to expand the AGRIS knowledge providing much data as possible about a topic or a bibliographical resource. Using Agrovoc as backbone, OpenAgris can interlink with a lot of existing datasets (actually DBPedia, World Bank, Geopolitical Ontology, FAO fisheries dataset, AGRIS serials dataset, etc…), showing as much information as possible about a specific topic, as statistics about fish species or geographical distribution of plants. In this way, OpenAgris will be a centralized portal that will aggregate all information the Web knows about a specific topic, research area (in the agricultural sector) or bibliographic reference.