Drupal: indexing nodes with Agrovoc (without a module)

Instructions to implement manual Agrovoc indexing (with an Agrovoc search popup) in Drupal without the need of a dedicated module:
http://aims.fao.org/community/agridrupal/blogs/drupal-indexing-nodes-agrovoc-without-module

Travel to Bangkok, Thailand, for the APARIS workshop on ICM

Travel to Bangkok, Thailand.
Purpose: Participate in the “Workshop on ICT/ICM for National Agricultural Research Information Systems in the Asia-Pacific Region”, taking place from 14th to 17th September 2010 at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT). The workshop is co-organized and co-sponsored by APAARI, GFAR and FAO and will include discussion and training on the CIARD RING and AgriDrupal.
Where (city / venue):
Bangkok
Country:
Thailand
Dates:
Monday, September 13, 2010 (All day) – Monday, September 20, 2010 (All day)
Tag Technorati: 9ICM4ARD, GFAR, CIARD RING

Travel to Tucson for the Rangelands West project

Travel to Tucson (AZ), USA..
Purpose: Attend the Face-to-face meeting for the launch of the Rangelands West project taking place from 7th to 10th September 2010 at the University of Arizona. The theme of the meeting is to discuss the Rangelands project where OEKC is a consultant partner on the overall design and compliance with agricultural information management standards.
Where (city / venue):
Tucson (AZ)
Country:
United States of America
Dates:
Monday, September 6, 2010 (All day) – Saturday, September 11, 2010 (All day)

Status of the AgroTagger service and its integration into Drupal and DSpace

Yesterday, 1st September 2010, our group in FAO attended a presentation by Rahul Samaddar (IIT Kanpur) on the status of the AgroTagger service (more info on AgroTagger here).
 
Other meetings with Rahul are planned for the next two days. This is just a short summary of the first day.

The AgroTagger service is almost ready as a really interoperable web service: it will be a java application exposing a URL that can be called, that will accept text or the URL of a PDF and will return the selected Agrovoc terms (as text string at the beginning, then as XML and perhaps Json soon). For the moment, they implemented sort of an un-documented API that they use from PHP to push the document to their AgroTagger application server and have it indexed.
The current web page giving access to the service is:
http://agropedialabs.iitk.ac.in/Tagger/
 
The AgroTagger Drupal module that has been developed is not a client module (allowing to index Drupal nodes) as expected, but an interface to the AgroTagger service itself: it creates a page on the Drupal website that allows to send text or a PDF to the AgroTagger and display the resulting terms. Although different from what expected, since it is apparently easy to make this Drupal page act as a URL accepting parameters and returning XML, the potential of implementing a RESTful AgroTagger web service on any Drupal installation is of high interest to us anyway and in the next days we will work on an implementation of the service on our server.
Once the web service is available, developing a client script in any Drupal installation will not be difficult, even without a module.

Another interesting achievement of the IIT team in Kanpur is their collaboration with ICRISAT for the implementation of a DSpace AgroTagger plugin for automatic indexing: the plugin was used in the ICRISAT repository DSpace installation and it successfully indexed 2000 documents. The remaining 1000 documents were scanned images instead of native PDFs so some semantics were lost, but they managed to do some lower-quality indexing anyway by using some OCR software and converting to PDF. An impressive result.
They are now waiting until the plugin is “standardized” for any DSpace installation and then they will release it for the DSpace community.Tag Technorati: Drupal, DSpace, AgroTagger

RDF solutions in Drupal and Agrovoc use case discussed at DrupalCon

On August 26th, at DrupalCon in Copenhagen, two “Birds of a Feather” meetings were held on Drupal and RDF.

Stéphane Carlosquet and Lin Clark demonstrated the latest versions of their modules (and also RDFa in core) and in the last sessions several use cases were discussed, among which our use case for an integration of Agrovoc directly from SKOS.

Several solutions to this and to other common use cases were proposed and discussed, some already usable in Drupal 6, some others (the best) working only in Drupal 7. Some of these solutions are also applicable to our AGRIS 2010 use case.

Stéphane summarized the two BoF sessions for the RDF group on Drupal.org:

“Today at DrupalCon Copenhagen, we’ve had the biggest gathering of RDF enthusiasts at the two Birds of a Feather we had during the day. I don’t have the exact number but I think we had about 40 people combined.” (http://groups.drupal.org/node/89589)