Publication of agricultural linked data based on FOODIE model (Czech Republic)
Creators: name: Charvát, Karel
name: Palma, Raul
name: Tomáš Řezník
name: Charvat, Karel
name: Lukas, Vojtech
name: Soumya Brahma
name: Kozuch, Dmitrij
name: Berzins, Raitis
Publisher: name: F1000 Research Limited
Year: 2018

description: Linked data is increasingly becoming one of the most popular methods for publishing data on the Web. There are different reasons for that: on the one hand, linked data defines simple principles for publishing and interlinking structured data that is accessible by both humans and machines. Improving the data accessibility lowers the barriers on finding and reusing this data, while providing machine-readable data facilitates the integration of this data into different applications. But also, on the other hand, linked data allows to discover more useful data through the connections with other datasets, and to exploit it in a more useful way through semantic queries.  As a result, there is a growing number of datasets becoming available in linked data format, as it can be seen on the Linking Open Data cloud diagram , which includes in the latest version (26th January 2017) more than 1100 datasets. However, although large cross-domains datasets exist (like dbpedia or freebase) and also some domains are already well covered, like Geography, Government, and Bioinformatics, this is still not the case for agricultural related data. Of course, we can find some relevant thesaurus in the domain like AGROVOC from FAO or the National Agricultural Library’s Agricultural Thesaurus (NALT) , but there is still a lack of datasets related to the agricultural facilities and farm management activities. This is in part due to the lack of standardized models for the representation of such data.  In FOODIE project, we addressed this issue with the development of the FOODIE data model. To ensure the maximum degree of data interoperability, the model follows INSPIRE generic data models, specially the data model for Agricultural and Aquaculture Facilities (AF) , by extending and specializing them. For instance, we found the lack of a feature on a more detailed level than Site that is part of the INSPIRE AF. The key motivation was to represent a continuous area of agricultural land with one type of crop species, cultivated by one user in one farming mode (conventional vs. transitional vs. organic farming). Such concept is called Plot and represents the main element in the model, specially because it is the level to which the majority of agro data is related. One lower level than Plot is the ManagementZone, which enables a more precise description of the land characteristics in fine-grained areas. Additionally, FOODIE model includes concepts for crop and soil data, treatments, interventions, agriculture machinery, etc. Finally, the model re-uses data types defined in ISO standards (ISO 19101, ISO/TS 19103, ISO 8601 and ISO 19115) as well standardization efforts published under the INSPIRE Directive (like structure of unique identifiers). FOODIE data model was specified in UML  (as the INSPIRE models), but in [1] we described the process we followed to transform this model into an OWL ontology in order to enable the publication of linked data compliant with FOODIE data model.