Calls for papers

 

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies

 

Special Issue on: "Agricultural Metadata and Semantics"

Guest Editors:
Nikos Manouselis, Agricultural University of Athens, Greece
Gauri Salokhe, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Italy
Johannes Keizer, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Italy

A common vision that may serve as an enabler for sustainable development, environmental preservation and fighting hunger in the world is the involvement, collaboration and coordination of activities dealing with the production, organisation and exchange of agricultural knowledge. Numerous technical and subject experts are working on related topics, tackling with issues such as classifications and taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, thesauri, authority files, glossaries, metadata specifications and their application profiles, as well as ontology-driven applications.

In this direction, initiatives such as the Agricultural Information Management Standards (AIMS) and the Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) (http://www.fao.org/aims/) have been launched to involve as wide a sector of the agricultural community as possible. Their scope includes information providers, research institutes, academic institutions, educational/extension institutions, as well as the private sector. Important results have been produced as an outcome of this collaborative effort, and are already put in practice around the world.

In this context, the general aim of this special issue is to assess the current status and technologies, as well as to outline the major challenges and future perspectives, related to agricultural knowledge production, organisation, and exchange from a Semantic Web perspective. It aims to provide an overview of the state of the art in this field, by including a wide range of interdisciplinary contributions. Overall, it aims to outline the rich potential of the agricultural knowledge domain as an application field for advanced metadata- and semantic-driven systems and services.

Subject Coverage
Topics for the special issue include, but are not limited to:

• Agricultural information standards and specifications
• Agricultural metadata schemas and application profiles
• Multilingual agricultural vocabularies, taxonomies, glossaries and thesauri
• Metadata generation, harvesting, exchange in agricultural information systems
• Agricultural knowledge acquisition, elicitation and extraction
• Infrastructures, systems and services for agricultural knowledge organisation
• Repositories and archives for agricultural knowledge
• Agricultural ontology approaches, models, theories, and languages
• Agricultural ontology development, integration, lifecycle, and evaluation
• Management of large ontology-driven agricultural data and knowledge bases
• Applications in domains such as education & training, commerce, public administration

Notes for Prospective Authors

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere

All papers are refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors, sample copies and other relevant information for submitting papers are available on the Author Guidelines page

Important Dates

Potential contributors are strongly encouraged to submit an extended abstract for feedback as to the suitability of proposed papers by: February 1st, 2008

Notification of appropriateness: 1 March, 2008

Manuscript submission: 1 June, 2008

Notification of acceptance/rejection: 1 August, 2008

Final manuscript due: 1 October, 2008