Knowledge management at FAO: A case study on network of ontologies in fisheries

Abstract

In this chapter, we illustrate the work conducted at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) with the creation of a network of ontologies about fisheries, developed with NeOn technologies and methodologies. The network included the main thematic areas needed to talk about fish stocks (often referred to as aquatic resources) and included data sources of various types: reference data for time series, thesauri for document indexing, actual time series, and the reuse of an existing well-known ontology maintained by FAO (the geopolitical ontology). Such a network of ontologies was also used within a prototypical web-based application. After describing the methodologies used to create the network, and its contents and features, we draw some conclusions and highlight the lessons learned during the process.