The AIMS Metadata Group of Interest is glad to announce the first Linked Open Data @ AIMS webinar entitled Linking your resources to the Data Web. The session will take place on 4th December 2012 - 16:00 Rome Time - and will be presented by Tom Baker, chief information officer (CIO) of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI).

This event is part of the series of webinars Linked Open Data @ AIMS that will take place from December 2012 to February 2013. A total of 6 specialists will talk about Linked Open Data and the Semantic Web to the agricultural information management community. The webinars will be in the 6 languages used on AIMS - English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and Russian.

The objective of Linked Open Data @ AIMS webinars is to help individuals and organizations to understand better the initiatives related to the Semantic Web that are currently taking place within the AIMS Communities of Practice.

Linking data into the Semantic Web means more than just making data available on a Web server. It means using Web addresses (URIs) in data as names for things; tagging resources using those URIs - for example, URIs for agricultural topics from AGROVOC; and using URIs to point to related resources.

This talk walks through a simple example to show how linking works in practice, illustrating RDF technology with animated graphics. It concludes with a recipe for linking your data: Decide what bits of your data are most important, such as Subject, Author, and Publisher. Use URIs in your data, whenever possible, such as Subject terms from AGROVOC. Then publish your data in RDF on the Web where others can link to it. Simple solutions can be enough to yield good results.

Tom Baker is CIO of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI). He has recently co-chaired the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group and the W3C Semantic Web Deployment Working Group, which published Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS). Tom holds an MLS from Rutgers University and an MA and PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University.

He has worked as a researcher at an economic institute in Italy; taught at the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand; led projects at the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD, later Fraunhofer) and the Goettingen State Library; and consulted with organizations such as the Max Planck Digital Library and the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).

Seeing metadata as language, Tom was instrumental in standardizing the Dublin Core and SKOS as Semantic Web vocabularies. He advocates a healthy ecosystem of vocabularies ranging from individual initiatives to formal standards and preserved by memory institutions, their persistent URIs serving as "footnotes" for data of long-term significance.

The session is open to anyone but places are limited. If you are interested to attend the webinar, send an e-mail to [email protected] before Monday 3 December, containg the following information:

• your name
• your affiliation
• your role
• your country

Once you have requested to attend the webinar, you will receive an e-mail confirming your place with an URL to access. Make sure that:

• you have good internet connection
• your computer has Java version 1.5 or higher (on many PC`s the Java engine is updated automatically). If in doubt, go to Checking system requirements
• you can use Internet Explorer, as Elluminate Live! - the web conferencing program used - runs best on it.

As part of the CIARD Movement, Linked Open Data @ AIMS is co-sponsored by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) and the International Association of Agricultural Information Specialists (IAALD).