Use of Semantic Wiki Tool to Build a Repository of Reusable Information Objects in Agricultural Education and Extension: results from a preliminary study PKaurauthorSPatwarauthorA GSylvesterauthorBVenkataramanauthorThere has been significant interest in applying the practices of semantic web to build an online repository of agricultural information (example: FAO-India efforts in AGROPEDIA). We will describe the results from a preliminary investigation into the use of a semantic tool for Mediawiki with content from the agricultural domain as the substrate. The English AGROVOC have been used to generate 17 broad categories of terms to harvest entries from the Wikipedia and to form the relationships. These can be browsed at http://vasatwiki.icrisat.org/index.php/. A total of 1000 articles were downloaded and posted onto a local server running MediaWiki software. A semantic tool (http://ontoworld.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki) was used to create additional tags in the hosted entries and links were formed. The searches inside the semantically re-constructed collection are more specific compared to searches on the downloaded collection. We are conscious that this may not be a rigorous comparison. An even more interesting possibility is the ease with which the entries can be constituted into information objects that can be reused because their relationships with other objects in this re-constituted domain are rich and complex. With suitable filters the information objects can be exported to various interfaces (re- purposing). An area of interest is the use of this approach to aggregate content for use in education and in extension. Information Science2011International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics Conference or Workshop Item