Engineering an ontology on organic agriculture and agroecology: the case of the Organic.Edunet project.

Education is essential to raise public awareness on organic agriculture and agroecology (OA & AE). The EU funded project Organic.Edunet will provide an online, freely-available portal where learning contents on OA & AE can be published and accessed through specialized technologies. Thus, the future Organic.Edunet portal will offer advanced services (such as ontology-based searching and social recommendation) and will facilitate search, retrieval and use of the collected content. This paper describes the method used for the effort of experts in different fields to agree and build together a conceptual model (in the form of an ontology) which would finally be the basis for the technical novelties and advanced functionalities provided by the portal.