Creating an Ontology from the Agricultural Thesaurus of Irandoc (Agrovoc)

The transformation in the field of information storage and retrieval systems has led to the emergence of new achievements, each utilizing tools to meet the needs of their users. The Semantic Web embodies the intelligent advancement of the current web for collecting, using, and interpreting information in a machine-processable format. This is an example of emerging capabilities that use the tool of "ontology" for designing information in the form of machine-processable models. Ontology, as the heart of the semantic storage and retrieval process, has gained progress and acceptance over time. The significant dependence of the Semantic Web on ontologies is due to the primary feature of this tool, which is to express concepts by clarifying the relationships among them within a domain of human knowledge, facilitating machine understanding and processing. The goal of creating an agricultural ontology and applying it in the information retrieval system is to structure information and ultimately represent knowledge with the help of technologies and standards being developed and completed by the World Wide Web Consortium. In other words, in the Semantic Web, machines participate in the process of analyzing and extracting the information desired by the user by identifying the data in existing documents, acting more intelligently in this regard. In the Semantic Web, search engines increasingly dominate the concept of data and its separation.Since the 1980s, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has developed and published the multilingual thesaurus "Agrovoc," which encompasses all topics of interest to the FAO, including nutrition, agriculture, forestry, fishing, and the environment, as well as preferred terms for organisms and environmental concepts, methods of plant cultivation, environmental research, and other related topics in over 40 languages. Currently, about 25 national and international organizations worldwide support the Agrovoc thesaurus. Agrovoc is available online and is based on RDF and SKOS structures, encompassing over 40,000 concepts that have distinguishing URIs. However, ultimately, for each concept in each language, a preferred term is assigned.Following the conversion of Irandoc thesauri into ontologies, the project aims to create an ontology of agricultural sciences using the agricultural thesaurus of Irandoc and aligning it with Agrontology available on the FAO website, focusing on the development of concepts and the