Agrotags

Tag (Metadata)

In online computer systems terminology, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an Internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are generally chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system. Tagging was popularized by websites associated with Web 2.0 and is an important feature of many Web 2.0 services.

Agrotag

The agrotags (http://agropedia.net/agrotags_version2/agro_tree.html) is a vocabulary developed by IIT Kanpur and ICRISAT with collaboration of FAO, Rome. It is actually a subset of the Multilingual Agricultural Thesaurus AGROVOC (http://aims.fao.org/website/AGROVOC-Thesaurus/) which is a huge agriculture thesaurus containing several thousand terms in many international languages. It has some 40,000 terms in English language alone. Out of these given terms, agrotags consists of approx 3,054 terms which are handpicked terms out of the 40,000 AGROVOC terms.

Criteria of selection

Only descriptors and more popular terms were selected to create Agrotags from Agrovoc. The non descriptors, scientific/taxonomic names, fishery related terms and geographical terms were not included in the selection process .This can be elaborated taking into account some simple examples like:
‘Rice’ is a term in Agrovoc (termcode-6599) and has non-descriptor ‘paddy’. ‘Rice’ is a term present in Agrotags but the term ‘paddy’ is not present so if our document consists of a keyword ‘paddy’ it will be mapped to ‘Rice’ term of Agrotags Similarly, ‘Organic Wastes’ (termcode-35237) is a term in Agrovoc as well as Agrotags. ‘Garden Wastes’ (termcode-35242) is a narrower term (NT) of ‘Organic Wastes’ in Agrovoc but not in Agrotags. Now if our document consists of Garden Wastes as its candidate term it will be mapped to its broader term that is ‘Organic Wastes’.
Scientific names, geopolitical names were also excluded and it was decided to address only agriculture domain in this edition of Agrotags resulting in the removal of fisheries related terms as well.
To summarize, the following equation describes the relationship between Agrotags and Agrovoc:
Agrotags = Agrovoc - (Non_Descriptor terms+ Scientific Terms + Geopolitical Terms + Fisheries)

Top level terms of Agrotags

Agrovoc has 25 top level terms where as Agrotags has 15 Top level terms. Agrotags top level terms are not a subset of Agrovoc top level terms but a subset of the overall Agrovoc(Fig.1).

Use of Agrotags

Agrotags currently are stroed in an internal database format which is used by OpenAgri, an open source repository for agricultural documents developed by IIT-Kanpur and ICRISAT. This repository provides for rich semantic interlinking between document using Agrotags. Documents are also automatically tagged using the Agrotagger algorithm.