There has been significant interest in applying the practices of semantic web to build an online repository of agricultural information in recent times. An ongoing project titled "Re-designing the farmer-extension-agricultural research/ education continuum in India with ICT-mediated knowledge management" has created AGROPEDIA (http://agropedia.net/), pioneered by experts from IIT-K.
The Wiki has offered unprecedented opportunities in collaborative content development while tools of the semantic web will offer altogether new advantages in terms of search and personalisation, to mention just two. The AGROVOC English language keywords has been used to generate classifications for content description at a top level.
We used the 17 broad categories of AGROVOC English terms to harvest entries from the Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki). Based on these categories, as the top level keywords, we noted that agricultural content forms a relatively minor part of the Wikipedia classified under 53 subcategories. A total of 1000 entries, as on 06.July.2007, were downloaded and posted onto a local Wiki server, running MediaWiki software. A semantic tool (available at http://ontoworld.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki) was used to create additional tags in the hosted entries and links were formed. The searches inside the semantically re-constructed collection are more specific compared to searches on the downloaded collection from the Wikipedia. An even more interesting possibility that emerges is the ease with which the entries can be constituted into information objects that can be reused because their relationships with other objects in this re-constituted domain are rich and complex.
