Spotlight on Agrisemantics II

SWAT4HCLS Agriculture sponsor

 

After the success of last year’s 2018 Spotlight on Agrisemantics in Antwerp, SWAT4HCLS will again include a spotlight on the fast emerging arena of Agrisemantics. The program will include a tutorial, a featured presentation and a panel session each highlighting the opportunities, challenges and successes in this important new application area.

Tutorial: The Agricultural Semantic Web and its role in Digital Agriculture

Presented by: Brett Drury

The world faces a food crisis. The World Bank has stated that agricultural gains will level off by 2050. Faced with increasing population, flat crop yields and an increasing demand for a Western lifestyle the current agricultural methods are not sufficient to meet future food demand. Newer agricultural techniques such as GMOs have faced hostility from the general public, and their development has been stymied. The answer seems to be Digital Agriculture which allows farmers to increase yields by making better decisions. The focus of many digital agriculture related academic papers has been the applications of data gathered from sensors and other agricultural data sources. The semantic web has largely been ignored. This tutorial will argue that the semantic web is a required element of digital agriculture, and will present a wide ranging review of the Agricultural Semantic Web as well as its applications. In addition there will be an opportunity to undertake some practical exercises using the resources described in the tutorial.

Related Reading: A survey of semantic web technology for agriculture

Introduction from GODAN

Dr. Suchith Anand is the Chief Scientist and Adviser at the Global Open data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN).  He is an internationally recognized expert in geospatial science, having authored a wide range of publications; from journal papers, scientific reports and book chapters, to keynote presentations and international strategy documents. Dr. Anand been an invited speaker at the United Nations and has served as the founding chair of the ICA Commission on Open Source Geospatial Technologies and Geospatial IG of the Research Data Alliance (RDA).  He serves on the Editorial Board of Journal on Open Geospatial Data, Software and Standards and on the Program Board of Group on Earth Observations (GEO). He is leading open geospatial science through the establishment of Open Source Geospatial Labs/Research Centres in key universities worldwide as part of the GeoForAll initiative. Dr. Anand  co-founded GeoForAll with a vision to make geospatial education and digital economy opportunities accessible to all stakeholders toward a better future for all.

The Panel

Fernanda C. Dórea

Department of Disease Control & Epidemiology, National Veterinary Institute, Sweden

Dr. Fernanda Dórea is a veterinary epidemiologist from Brazil. She holds a Master degree in infectious disease modeling from the University of Georgia (USA), and a PhD in epidemiology from the University of Prince Edward Island (Canada). She currently works at the Swedish National Veterinary Institute, conducting research and development projects focused on automated extraction of information from animal health data, aiming to support disease surveillance, control and prevention. For more information: www.datadrivensurveillance.org.

Monika Solanki

Dr. Monika Solanki is currently the Principal Data Scientist at Agrimetrics. During her career she has focused on developing ontology design patterns, models and applications in the area of knowledge representation and reasoning using Semantic Web technologies and Linked data principles. She has worked extensively on building ontology-driven frameworks for bridging the gap between data and software engineering, developing and implementing stream processing algorithms and models for tracking and tracing in supply chains, using event based pedigrees over GS1 standards and developing decision support systems for the clinical and bioenergy sectors. Dr Solanki has extensive experience in designing and developing ontological domain models, curating linked datasets, implementing Semantic Web applications and Web services for a number of interdisciplinary projects spanning the boundaries of Big data, Software Engineering, Computer Science, Bioenergy, Clinical trials, Archaeology and Plant Biology. She has a PhD in Computer Science, a postgraduate diploma in Advanced Computing with Data Communication and Networking and a degree in Engineering.

Dr Marie-Angélique Laporte is an associate scientist at Bioversity International with a Ph.D. in ecology from the University of Montpellier. Her doctoral research focused on the integration of functional plant trait data. As a postdoc she worked at the French Institute for Research in Development (IRD) in Montpellier on automatic classification of remote sensing images using ontologies. She also worked with the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena on developing a semantic system used by the TRY database. In 2015, she joined Bioversity to work on the NSF-funded Planteome project for the development of a set of reference ontologies for plants. In her current role, Marie-Angélique works on various data related issues, including developing ontologies and metadata standards, and applying text mining techniques to extract agricultural information. She is involved with the CGIAR Big Data Platform, the Crop Ontology and the Agronomy Ontology projects.