Combining different points of view on plant descriptions: mapping agricultural plant roles and biological taxa

Florence Amardeilh; Sophie Aubin; Stephan Bernard; Sonia Bravo; Robert Bossy; Catherine Faron; Franck Michel; Juliette Raphel; Catherine Roussey

doi:10.3389/frai.2023.1188036

Combining different points of view on plant descriptions: mapping agricultural plant roles and biological taxa

Front Artif Intell. 2023 Sep 27:6:1188036. doi: 10.3389/frai.2023.1188036. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Florence Amardeilh¹, Sophie Aubin², Stephan Bernard³, Sonia Bravo², Robert Bossy⁴, Catherine Faron⁵, Franck Michel⁵, Juliette Raphel¹, Catherine Roussey^{3

6}

Affiliations

¹ Elzeard, Bordeaux, France.
² DipSO, INRAE, Paris, France.
³ Université Clermont Auvergne, INRAE, UR TSCF, Clermont-Ferrand, France.
⁴ MaIAGE, INRAE, Université Paris-Saclay, Jouy-en-Josas, France.
⁵ Université Côte d'Azur, Inria, I3S, Sophia-Antipolis, France.
⁶ MISTEA, University of Montpellier, INRAE & Institut Agro, Montpellier, France.

Abstract

This article describes our study on the alignment of two complementary knowledge graphs useful in agriculture: the thesaurus of cultivated plants in France named French Crop Usage (FCU) and the French national taxonomic repository TAXREF for fauna, flora, and fungi. FCU describes the usages of plants in agriculture: "tomatoes" are crops used for human food, and "grapevines" are crops used for human beverage. TAXREF describes biological taxa and associated scientific names: for example, a tomato species may be "Solanum lycopersicum" or a grapevine species may be "Vitis vinifera". Both knowledge graphs contain vernacular names of plants but those names are ambiguous. Thus, a group of agricultural experts produced some mappings from FCU crops to TAXREF taxa. Moreover, new RDF properties have been defined to declare those new types of mapping relations between plant descriptions. The metadata for the mappings and the mapping set are encoded with the Simple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings (SSSOM), a new model which, among other qualities, offers means to report on provenance of particular interest for this study. The produced mappings are available for download in Recherche Data Gouv, the federated national platform for research data in France.

Keywords: French national taxonomic repository; SKOS model; SSSOM; TAXREF; crop; mapping; taxa; thesaurus French Crop Usage.

Grants and funding

This study was achieved with support from the Data to Knowledge in Agronomy and Biodiversity (D2KAB-www.d2kab.org) project that received funding from the French National Research Agency (ANR-18-CE23-0017). This study was also carried out by the French government as part of the Recovery Plan and the Future Investment Program “i-Nov”.