Common Agriculture Vocabulary for Enhancing Semantic-level Interoperability in Japan

We introduce the features of Common Agriculture Vocabulary (CAVOC) and CAVOC-based services, review other resources for standards in the domains of agriculture and food, and briefly discuss the future direction of agricultural semantics standards in Japan based on reviews. CAVOC has been developed as a core vocabulary for enhancing semantics-level interoperability. It specifies concepts that are frequently used to annotate agricultural data on agricultural activities and crops in Japan. The CAVOC website provides uniform resource identifiers by which the concepts in CAVOC are given. The data in CAVOC can be downloaded from the website. The extension of CAVOC coverage is important to unambiguously define objects and their relationships in the domains of agriculture and food. International collaborative efforts to create standards in agricultural semantics are underway through mapping among semantic resources within international projects and by holding meetings among stakeholders. We need to join the international community in creating agricultural semantics standards so as to extend CAVOC coverage through the utilization of foreign resources.