Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) 2013 Symposium Talk: Creating a semantic framework for cultivated plants for the international e-collaboration on agrobiodiversity

Knowledge management is a recent concept in Information and Communications Technology (ICT), resulting from the growing recognition of the value of knowledge work and information technology capacities (Huysman & Wulf, 2005). Virtual research laboratories and social networks are being created over the web to propose information/knowledge services that will stimulate information flow and international collaboration. Transnational, local or global, collaborative knowledge can be produced with an unprecedented rapidity due to spreading of social networks supported by IT solutions.

However, various communities of stakeholders, from farmers to scientists and policy makers, generate a broad representation of knowledge, information, and data on cultivated plants.  The resources generated are produced at various scales, from local to global, presenting an additional challenge for consolidation. Therefore, to consolidate this collective knowledge in a meaningful way, semantic mediation between these representations and the creation of harmonized metadata are necessary steps.

Semantic web standards, like ontologies and standard metadata, can help mediate between sources of information and improve the discovery of data by the stakeholders. Due to infrastructure limitations or technological costs, online information systems cannot always be properly used in developing countries. Through Information and Communication Technologies for Development (IC4D), novel approaches are being deployed in developing countries to make the information mobile, close to the end-user. The potential of using mobile phones to connect diverse stakeholders along the agricultural value chain seems an obvious solution. For rural populations, dispersed and isolated from knowledge centers, the information and communication capabilities of mobile phones can be valuable with a predominant use of short message services (SMS) (World Bank, 2012). These widely available services can be explored for producing agrobiodiversity information.