The Semantic Web and Ontologies in Agri-Food workshop (SWAF12) was held as part of Smart AgriMatics on Wednesday 13 June. An exciting collection of speakers drew a crowd of over 40 participants.

Highlights included a presentation from Phillipe Loopuyt concerning the substantial datasets that the EC DG Health and Consumers is making available using semantic technologies. Huub Scholten made the case for semantic interoperability in the agri-food supply chain and presented a potential architecture for implementing this.  Johannes Keizer discussed results from agHarvest project in semantically marking up texts and pulling together distributed information sources in the AGRIS system. Carlos Damásio presented very interesting results from attempting to implement semantic technologies on an android platform in order to provide advice to agronomists. Tomasz Kluza presented his work on ontology based systems for controlling and supporting grain drying processes and came up with well worked out proposals for further work also discussed later on. Claus Sørensen explained the need for detailed geospatial representations in Farm Management Information Systems. Monika Solanki provided an account of her work on an ontology based system for decision support in the design of algae biomass plants. Daniel Martini gave an account of the latest developments in the construction of AgroRDF.

The workshop concluded with a wide ranging discussion concerning incentives for providing data, the role of regulation in making data available, the need for EC regulations to be available in structured formats, and the role technology could play in reducing waste and pesticide use and identifying the total environmental and social cost of food production.  A major outcome was much greater awareness about existing vocabularies and data sets. Johannes Keizer pointed out that his team provided spaces to record both ontologies and data sets (cf. http://aims.fao.org/vest-registry/browse-by-vocabularies%20).

The full programme is available on the workshop website here: http://www.agrixchange.org/sam-workshop/semantic-web-and-ontologies-agri-food