OVERVIEW

A common vision that may serve as an enabler for sustainable development, environmental preservation, and fighting hunger in the world, is the involvement, collaboration and coordination of activities dealing with the production, organisation and exchange of agricultural knowledge. 
Numerous technical and subject experts are working on related topics, tackling with issues such as classifications & taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, thesauri, authority files, glossaries, metadata specifications and their application profiles, as well as
ontology-driven applications.

The general aim of this special issue is to assess the current status and technologies, as well as to outline the major challenges and future perspectives, related to agricultural knowledge production, organization, and exchange from a Semantic Web perspective. It aims to provide an overview of the state of the art in this field, by including a wide range of interdisciplinary contributions. Overall, it aims to outline the rich potential of the agricultural knowledge domain as an application field for advanced metadata- and semantic-driven systems and services.

TOPICS

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Agricultural information standards and specifications
* Agricultural metadata schemas and application profiles
* Multilingual agricultural vocabularies, taxonomies, glossaries and thesauri
* Metadata generation, harvesting, exchange in agricultural information systems
* Agricultural knowledge acquisition, elicitation and extraction
* Infrastructures, systems and services for agricultural knowledge organisation
* Repositories and archives for agricultural knowledge
* Agricultural ontology approaches, models, theories, and languages
* Agricultural ontology development, integration, lifecycle, and evaluation
* Management of large ontology-driven agricultural data and knowledge bases
* Applications in domains such as education & training, commerce, public administration
IMPORTANT DATES

* 1-2 Page Abstract (recommended): 1 February 2008
* Notification of appropriateness: 1 March 2008
* Manuscript submission: 1 June 2008
* Notification of acceptance/rejection: 1 August 2008
* Final manuscript due: 1 October 2008
* Tentative publication date: Spring, 2009

SUBMISSION

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently
under consideration for publication elsewhere. All papers will be refereed
through a peer review process.

Potential contributors to the special issue are strongly encouraged to
submit an extended abstract for feedback as to the suitability of proposed
papers until February 1st, 2008.

Submissions should be sent as e-mail attachments to the following addresses:
nikosm[at]ieee[dot]org & gauri.salokhe[at]fao[dot]org

More detailed information can be found online:
http://www.inderscience.com/browse/callpaper.php?callID=804

GEST EDITORS

* Nikos Manouselis, Informatics Laboratory, Agricultural University of Athens, Greece
* Gauri Salokhe, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Italy
* Johannes Keizer, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Italy