Agrisemantics WG rev-003

“Semantic Interoperability is usually defined as the ability of services and systems to exchange data in a meaningful/useful way.” In practice, achieving semantic interoperability is a hard task, in part because the description of data (their meanings, methodologies of creation, relations with other data etc.) is difficult to separate from the contexts in which the data are produced. This problem is evident even when trying to use or compare data sets about seemingly unambiguous observations, such as the height of a given crop (depending on how height was measured, at which growth phase, under what cultural conditions, …). Another difficulty with achieving semantic interoperability is the lack of the appropriate set of tools and methodologies that allow people to produce and reuse semantically-rich data, while staying within the paradigm of open, distributed and linked data.

The use and reuse of accurate semantics for the description of data, datasets and services, and to provide interoperable content (e.g., column headings, and data values) should be supported as community resources at an infrastructural level. Such an infrastructure should enable data producers to find, access and reuse the appropriate semantic resources for their data, and produce new ones when no reusable resource is available. The Agrisemantics working group aims at being a community hub for the diffusion of knowledge and practices related to semantic interoperability in agriculture, and to serve a common place where the future of data interoperability through semantics will be envisaged.

Agrisemantics_WG_CaseStatement.pdf