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**Apologies if you receive this message more than once** The Sixth Agricultural Ontology Service Workshop on "Ontologies: the more practical issues and experiences" July 25-28, 2005, Vila Real, Portugal The Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS) Initiative was launched by FAO in 2001 and the first of the series of workshops took place in November of the same year. The goal of the AOS initiative is to discuss common semantic standards for enhanced web applications and improving access to agricultural information resources. The activities within the AOS initiative are documented on the AOS website at: http://www.fao.org/agris/aos. The Sixth AOS workshop will provide an opportunity for information management specialists to learn about the AOS and to strengthen partnerships in collectively building the AOS. One of the major aims for this workshop is to provide an international forum to share and exchange information about the use of ontologies to address the problems of accessing multilingual information. The objective is to share experiences in creating, managing, updating and using ontologies and other Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) in the management of digital resources. The workshop will cover the following topics: *Bringing coherence through the use of common semantics - This session will address the problems of managing and sharing information within decentralized information systems and the use of semantic tools such as ontologies to bring coherence to their contents. The session will discuss the idea of implementing traditional authority files by structuring them into ontologies. The session will give an overview of the Clearinghouse Initiative and an explanation of its objectives and status. *Maintaining distributed and decentralized thesauri and ontologies - The session will discuss participants' experiences in using different tools, such as the KAON Suite, Protégé etc., in maintaining distributed and decentralized thesauri and ontologies. The session will try to address the issues of URI, provenance and experiences in using OWL to structure thesauri and ontologies. *From thesauri to Ontologies - This session will focus on the methodologies adapted and issues arising during the process of migrating thesauri to ontologies. It will cover the problems of structural differences, content restructuring etc., encountered during the process of converting the AGROVOC thesaurus into an ontology. The session will also discuss the steps involved in creating a concept server by integrating three different KOS (FAO Terminology database, AGROVOC Thesaurus and FAO Glossary). *Use of Ontologies in Web Applications - The objective of this session is to bring the theory into practice by providing concrete examples and methodologies that can eventually be extended to other applications. The session will include presentations of some practical examples, and illustrate the results achieved by exploiting knowledge stored within ontologies. Important dates Papers are invited regarding all the topics covered by the workshop. à àJanuary 31, 2005: Deadline for the submission of abstracts à àFebruary 28, 2005: Notification of acceptance of papers à àMay 15, 2005: Deadline for the submission of camera-ready full paper Workshop organizing committee: Dr. Johannes Keizer, FAO, Italy Prof. Asanee Kawtrakul, Kasetsart University, Bangkok, Thailand Ms. Gauri Salokhe, FAO, Italy For further information contact: Johannes Keizer [log in to unmask]