Ontology-based navigation of bibliographic metadata: example of the Food, Nutrition and Agriculture Journal

This paper describes the work done within the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on providing an ontology-based navigation to the Food, Nutrition and Agriculture (FNA) Journal. The aim of the revised navigation was to provide more efficient and effective browsing of the Food and Nutrition Publications using a knowledge model to guide the user with concepts and relationships relevant to a specific subject area. With this approach, data from two different bibliographical databases were reused, by merging and unifying them and make them better accessible to users. A preliminary metadata merge was needed to combine all the information into one system in order to produce a metadata-ontology. Resource Description Framework Schema (RDFS) has been chosen to exploit semantic relationships e.g. the possibilities of browsing the data in different ways (by keywords, categories, authors, etc.), and the creation of a multilingual concept-based advanced search.