Dear friends of AGRIS,

This has been a busy year, and as we prepare to relax  in the holiday period  we would like to share a few of the 2012 highlights that you helped us to achieve.

First is surely the largest single year growth in AGRIS’ 37 year history. We implemented a multi-pronged strategy this year to expand our holdings:

• the first was to import 1.2 million legacy records that were part of AGRIS’ early days;
• secondly we energetically harvested and indexed important open repositories such as those of Wageningen UR, AgEcon, DFID R4D, World Bank OKR, and DOAJ, which collectively brought in over 200 thousand records all with relevant links to the full text of the referenced publications.

We also rolled out a new tool, AgriMetaMaker (AMM) that allows the AGRIS data provider community to generate high quality metadata using AGROVOC Web Services in a few simple steps. The 25 Institutions accessing AMM have contributed to the growth of the AGRIS community, which currently includes approximately 150 active centers. Your contributions helped to increase the amount of AGRIS web traffic in 2012 by more than 20%, so that we now serve over one million pages per month to some 200 thousand unique visitors.

2012 saw the finalization and full release of the AGRIS Serials, a work begun in 2011. It is a disambiguated set of records describing over twenty thousand agricultural journals whose articles are indexed in AGRIS. These are augmented by authoritative metadata from the ISSN Centre in Paris and DOAJ to create a constantly evolving set of validated, high-quality journal metadata.

Of course all these efforts would not have been half as exciting had we not with the assistance of FAO Reference Center MIMOS BERHAD, fully embraced the possibilities of the semantic web by publishing both the serials metadata and all of the AGRIS records as RDF triples with a SPARQL endpoint and a Pubby front-end, leading to a database of more than 100 million triples, and the foundation of an ever-growing FAO semantic web presence.   We proudly and gratefully acknowledge that our AGRIS work  has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° 283770.

Last but not least, 2012 saw several new versions of OpenAGRIS, a semantic web mashup that uses AGRIS records, the AGRIS serials, AGROVOC keywords and the FAO geo-political ontology to dynamically query external systems, creating a constellation of related resources around every AGRIS record. Version 2 has just been released and forms the basis of our team’s efforts to win the LOD-LAM 2013 challenge.

It was a great year. Thanks for being a part of it. Happy holidays and see you in 2013.

The AGRIS team

FAO of the UN

[email protected]