The AGRIS 2010 project: A portal for resource discovery in agriculture

At the 2009 International Conference on Dublin Core, Stefano Anibaldi made a presentation entitled "How data is collected and integrated by FAO."

He posed two problems:

1. "Classic bibliographic metadata is often understood in an overly-simplistic fashion: users are seeking information against a system populated with metadata, which provides a metadata-driven interface through which users find their way to their target documents."
   
2. "The results are bibliographic descriptions rich in its metadata but too often not sufficient for researchers who want to extend their knowledge on a specific topic."

And shared some solutions:

• "With the rise of full text search and online availability of more research material, such a role for metadata can appear redundant."
  
• "Bibliographic metadata grows in value as the Web grows in connectivity, and can provide researchers with a map of the global research community, linking their papers, thesis, articles with a wider grey literature (preprints, drafts) and with communication platforms (blogs, forums) that help researchers put formal findings into a wider context."
  
• "The main objective of the new AGRIS portal is to become a hub to access the diverse knowledge in agricultural science and technology available globally on the web."
  
• "It not only gives the researchers access to the AGRIS metadata, but it also provides data services to extend their knowledge, accessing Web data such as full text documents and news."

Download the presentation ...
More on AGRIS ...

FAO organizes WEBAGRIS User Group Workshop

From 18 to 22 May 2009, FAO organizes a workshop to strengthen the community of WEBAGRIS users and managers of catalogues and institutional repositories.

Interested? Get more details from Stefka Kaloyanova at FAO: (stefka.kaloyanova AT fao.org)

Join GFAR project to share information on agricultural organizations

The Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR) seeks interested people to contribute to a joint project to easily share and update information on organizations in agriculture.

According to GFAR's Valeria Pesce, "All agricultural research and development organizations need updated and reliable information on other organizations and institutions, their expertise, projects and outputs." The problem is they each tackle the problem independently.

At the March 2007 meeting of the AgrisContent Taskforce, it was suggested that a 'distributed architecture' might work, in which organizations maintain basic standard information about themselves. GFAR, with FAO was tasked to further detail the proposed architecture [see the proposal].

To proceed with this project, Valeria and her colleagues need feedback on the proposal and the participation of as many organizations as possible. She will ensure that their collaboration only requires a very simple task: creating their own
description in the standard format, for which we will also provide a user-friendly web page that will automatically format the description.

Tags: agricultural information organizations gfar

Agriscontent task force meets in Wageningen

Following discussions in Rome in October 2005, FAO has convened several task forces looking at ways to enhance the coherence among different agricultural information systems.

In early March 2007, members of the 'agriscontent' task force met to take stock of progress and to identify potential new areas for collaboration in the field of content management.

Issues discussed were:

• The Open Access publishing paradigm
• Subject vocabularies and advanced semantic applications
• Newsfeeds and Web2.0 approaches
• Integrated systems
  

Participants also formulated conclusions and recommended further actions in preparation for the second Expert Consultation to be held in Rome in September 2007.

Read the full report.

Tags: agricultural information agris fao

Towards an open archive AGRIS network

A recent paper from FAO outlines how open access architecture and models can be used within the AGRIS Network to share and disseminate research outputs.

The proposed architecture combines the experience and history of the AGRIS network with the new scholarly Open Access publishing paradigm and the international Open Archive Initiative. Implementation of this architecture will lead to a very important space on the web into which thousands of data providers will feed their publications and on which many services will be based. This promises to be a major achievement, comparable only to other big projects like PubMed in the medical sector.

Tags: agricultural information agris open access