A record of the VALERIE project’s approach to turning a multilingual body of research and practical documents into a searchable resource for agricultural and forestry practitioners.
Agricultural and forestry research produces valuable findings, but practical adoption can be limited when results are difficult to find, interpret or connect with day-to-day management questions. The European VALERIE project examined how research-led innovations could be organised and made more accessible to practitioners.
The project developed a method for extracting and summarising useful knowledge from scientific and practical documents. Its framework combined a domain ontology, a document collection and a search system intended to help users formulate questions and retrieve relevant passages.
The project’s ontology defined agricultural and forestry concepts and the relationships between them. Domain specialists developed this vocabulary so that equivalent ideas, related terms and synonyms could be connected across documents and languages. At the recorded stage of the project, the ontology contained 6,169 concepts.
Scientific and practice-oriented material from multiple sources was assembled into a document base. Automated annotation matched terms and short phrases in each document with concepts from the ontology. In October 2016 the collection held 4,278 documents, including 201 concise innovation summaries prepared within the project.
The search interface was designed to resemble the exchange between a practitioner and a subject specialist. It helped users articulate a question through term completion and related suggestions, expanded searches with synonyms, and extracted ranked passages from the underlying documents.
The paper frames access as more than document retrieval. By linking practitioner language to a structured subject vocabulary, the approach aimed to reduce the distance between formal research outputs and management decisions in farms and forests.
Three connected elements structured the project’s route from source material to relevant results.
A specialist ontology provides a consistent vocabulary and maps relationships among agricultural and forestry topics.
Automated matching links terms in scientific and practical documents to concepts in the shared vocabulary.
Query support, synonym expansion and passage ranking help surface material related to a practitioner’s question.
Agronomy Journal presents this article as an archival research record. The project stage, document counts and technical approach reflect the period reported by the study and should not be read as a current status statement.
The record includes a concise editorial summary, bibliographic details and direct routes to the available full-text formats.
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