A new semantic resource responding to the principles of Open Science: The meat thesaurus as an IT tool for dialogue between sector actors

Abstract

Nowadays, it is important to make the results of scientific research accessible in a simple and understandable way according to the Open Science policy. This movement uses tools to enhance findability and interoperability of data. This paper describes the transformation of the meat dictionary published by the French Meat Academy as a book into a machine actionable and freely accessible terminological resource based on the SKOS standard format. This thesaurus contains 1567 concepts describing the meat production chain. This work was carried out by experts in semantic web, meat biology and meat vocabulary. This thesaurus can be used to index articles, journals and datasets, thus facilitating consultation; it can also be used to facilitate interoperability of the indexed datasets and provide contextual definitions for building ontologies, i.e. formal descriptions of knowledge for reasoning on data. The thesaurus can be useful to enrich other vocabularies with new knowledge, such as French specificities in terms of meat cuts or definitions.