The use of meaningful metadata for bibliographic content description and the use of shared vocabularies are primary steps in facilitating interoperability. AIMS provides recommendations to facilitate this exchange of data and information sharing by providing a set of common metadata properties and encouraging the use of authority data, controlled vocabularies, and syntax encoding standards:

• The Agricultural Metadata Element Set (AgMES) namespace, was designed to standardise the description of elements and encoding schemes required for resources such as websites, documents, pictures, databases etc. AgMES elements are used by five application profiles.
• Meaningful Bibliographic Metadata (M2B) is a set of recommendations for content providers to select appropriate metadata properties for the creation, management and exchange of meaningful bibliographic information.
• The VEST registry includes namespace and application profiles developed and maintained in the AIMS community and beyond for documents, events, geospatial data, organizations, learning objects, persons/experts, project, statistics and research data.

To encourage publishing rich metadata, two tools Drupal and Dspace (to AgriDrupal and AgriOcean Dspace, respectively) have been customised with vocabularies and metadata formats guaranteeing the exposure of metadata compliant with OAI-PMH.