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Existing standards for managing agricultural information

The Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS) aims at providing semantic-based services to users in the agricultural domain. This means making available resources (e.g. KOS, metadata standards, guidelines, communities) or functionalities (e.g. tools, online services, web services) that could be used:

  • by IT experts to build systems that could easily exchange and/or synchronize data (interoperate);
  • by domain experts to make use of this services in their daily work and be sure that this is compliant with agricultural standards and norms.

This section of the website gives an overview of existing specifications for organizing information (classifications, thesauri, ontologies, ...) and describing information objects (metadata models, schemas, Application Profiles, ...) in the domain of agriculture.

Products developed by FAO or in collaboration between FAO and other partners are described in detail and are accessible through browsing / searching facilities from this website. See:

A broader overview is provided by a more comprehensive Registry of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) that includes products created and managed by other organizations, Institutions and users.