Background

AGRIS (International System for Agricultural Science and Technology) is a database with more than 7.7 million structured bibliographical records on agricultural science and technology. The database is curated by FAO, and its content is provided by more than 150 participating institutions from 65 countries. With its search system, AGRIS helps scientists, researchers and students to perform sophisticated searches by keywords from the AGROVOC thesaurus, by agricultural journal title or by country, institution, or author.

The AGRIS team has recently released the AGRIS 2.0, the merge of the traditional bibliographic AGRIS search engine with OpenAGRIS, a pilot application based on the AGRIS RDF-ization. AGRIS uses Linked Open Data methodologies to link bibliographic records to other  datasets on the web with the objective to enrich the information provided in AGRIS records. Currently AGRIS interlinks to datasets like DBPedia, World Bank, FAO Geopolitical Ontology, Nature OpenSearch, and Biodiversity International, using AGROVOC. More than 180 million triples have been generated so far.

Today AGRIS has become a reference portal to search and find resources related to agricultural research, and excellent use model to showcase the benefits of integrating LOD in traditional contexts like bibliographic databases.

Objective

In order to continue improving AGRIS and adapting the integration of existing information resources according to user requirements, the AGRIS team conducted in December 2013/January 2014 a survey on the usability of AGRIS 2.0 (released on December 5^th, 2013) and its functionalities. The survey contained 30 questions divided into the following thematic groups:

• General Appearance
• Search
• List of Search Results
• Search Results Details
• General Impressions

The survey was send to AGRIS and AIMS community members covering a big range of profiles from information management specialists, librarians and software developers, to researchers and students.

Key Findings

In reviewing the results of the survey, the general impression of the current usability and features of AGRIS 2.0 is positive. Interviewees agree that the new AGRIS provides a better service and the use of external information resources enriches the traditional bibliographical content exposed from the search engine. Some of the highlighted findings of the survey are the following:

The AGRIS interface is considered to be clear and intuitive by most of the interviewees. Recommendations were provided about the homepage as follows:

• to reduce the number of boxes (with information as statistics, newest records and most recurring keywords) on the homepage as they might confuse the user
• to improve the location of the advanced search function - especially access from the homepage and the search box

It was also recommended to use another palette of colours – more lively - to better structure the pages

The overall results also show that interviewees agree with the statement that it is easy to search in AGRIS. It was recommended to publish a manual or FAQ linked from the first page, and rename the classical view to advanced search in order to highlight the feature.

Recommendations on the use of metadata and the current integration of external information resources in the mashup pages focused on the following aspects:

• to add additional information like year and type of publication as well as information about the availability of full text was requested
• to provide the original link of the source
• to improve the reliability of the mashup pages (faster and better structured)
• to review the relevance of the information displayed from external resources

Next steps

The output of the survey was very important to understand users’ needs and how they feel comfortable with the system. The AGRIS team is going to use such an information to produce a design document for the restructure of the website, which will affect mainly the Web interface and how the information is displayed on the screen, but also functionalities. Four important points that will be addressed are:

• Customization of the views: since AGRIS has many users with different backgrounds and needs, AGRIS will become a Web portal where users can register and choose what to see on the screen. For instance, sers will choose boxes to be shown in the mashup page.
• Complete multilinguality of the website: when a user will make a search in a specific language, she will retrieve also results in other languages. For instance, if the user is looking for „饭“, she will retrieve also documents indexed with „rice“.
• The mashup page will be redisigned and reorganized, to group different boxes in different areas (e.g. videos, statistics, bibliographic resources, etc.)
• The interface will be redesigned to have more lively colours

Report with the results of the survey at http://aims.fao.orghttp://assets.aims.fao.org.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/public/AGRIS_Survey_Results.pdf