Publishing and linking semantically annotated agro-environmental resources to LOD with AGROPub

Abstract

Publishing agro-environmental resources to a linked open data (LOD) cloud requires publishers to adopt a set of universally recognized linked data principles. These principles, along with semantic annotations based on shared domain ontologies can ensure the semantic integration of agro-environmental resources. In this paper we present a resource-publishing system, called AGROPub, that we developed to aid agro-environmental resource providers to annotate, publish and integrate their resources to LOD. The system comprises services and tools that enable resource providers to annotate their resources by relevant concepts from selected agro-environmental domain ontologies, to generate and publish RDF descriptions of the resources to LOD and to link the published resources to related resources from LOD. In addition to the services and tools dedicated to resource providers, AGROPub provides services and tools that enable consumers of the agro-environmental resources to search and annotate published resources by adding their own annotations as well as to evaluate them based on given criteria. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.