Journal of Agricultural Informatics
The search and stakeholder engagement tool, “ask-Valerie.eu”, is at the core of the recently published, peer-reviewed paper, “From science to practice: Bringing innovations to agronomy and forestry”, written by VALERIE project partners, Don Willems, Nicole Koenderink and Jan Top (Wageningen University, Netherlands).
Willems, D.J.M., Koenderink, N.J.J.P., & Top, J.L. (2015). From science to practice: Bringing innovations to agronomy and forestry. Journal of Agricultural Informatics 6, 85-95, DOI: 10.17700/jai.2015.6.4.214. http://dx.doi.org/10.17700/jai.2015.6.4.214 or download the paper here.
Abstract
The challenge of the work presented here is to make innovative research output in the agronomy and forestry domain accessible to end-users, so that it can be practically applied. We have developed an approach that consists of three key-elements: an ontology with domain knowledge, a set of documents that have been annotated and meta-annotated, and a system (ask-Valerie) that is based on a dialogue to represent the interaction between end user and system.
We show that the dialogue-metaphor is a good way of modelling the interaction between user and system. The system helps the user in formulating his question and in answering it in a useful way. Meta-annotations of key-paragraphs in the document-base turn out to be relevant in assessing in one glance what the content of a document is.
End-users are very enthusiastic about the possibilities that ask-Valerie offers them in translating scientific results to their own situation.