AIMS in Action

Monthly Spotlight

AGRIS. Spring harvest: 7,550 records

AgriDrupal. Agrovocfield, new Drupal module

Open Access. Association Austrian Librarians supports E-LIS

AMS. FAO OA based on Fedora and FRBR

Conference presentation. Changing platforms. Parallel case studies of repository platform migration projects (OR11)

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Upcoming Events

Ireland. QQML 2012

South Africa. IAALD

UK. London Semantic Tech & Business Conference

India. MANLIBNET

Thailand. SNLP-AOS 2011

USA. Library 2.011 worldwide virtual conference

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Release AgriOcean DSpace: easy to install

News
 

Revamp the E-LIS logo: design competition!
E-LIS, the open archive for Library and Information Science, is looking for proposals to revamp its logo. This competition is part of a wide frame of activities that aim to improve the processes and the image of the electronic archive. The new logo should highlight the characteristics of E-LIS as an open, collaborative, international effort in the field of library and information science. The deadline is set for September the 30th. All interested designers should participate! The results will be announced by the end of October and the winner will receive a technological device, courtesy of Spanish Ministry of Culture, Office of Library Co-ordination.

New important Open Data portals in India and Kenya
The Rice Knowledge Management Portal (RKMP), a flaship initiative under National Agricultural Innovation Project (NAIP) aims to enable rice workers across India to create, manage and share scientific, technology- and market-related information for the benefit of the rice sector. A better flow of rice knowledge through a single gateway will contribute to the overall rice development in the country. The Kenya Open Data Portalmakes public government data acessible to the people of Kenya. High quality national census data, government expenditure, parliamentary proceedings and public service locations are just a taste of what's to come.

Results of the survey on Open Access repositories in the agricultural domain
The resultsof the survey conducted by FAO on Open Access document repositories in the agricultural domain are now available on AIMS. The overall aim was to obtain information about the existing digital repositories with a special regard to semantics and technology. To ensure that this survey is continued in time, for each repository a rich metadata record was added to the CIARD RING which can be updatedby its repository managers at all times. If your repository is not present yet, please registerto help us get an always more accurate picture of the state of the art of OA repositories.

OpenAgris 0.1 beta: bibliographic records linked to other datasets
OpenAgris is a new beta application based on RDF, a language for expressing data models using statements expressed as triples (semantic data). To start a first part of the AGRIS repository - records submitted from 2008 to 2011 - was converted to RDF and AGRIS journals. Links to other existing datasets were made to increase the amount of information on a record and a topic. OpenAgris does not display bibliographic records, but starts from a record to retrieve information from other datasets: DBPedia, Agrovoc, AGRIS journals. To see OpenAgris in action, take a look at this example.

More news at Of Interest

5 Questions in 5 Minutes with Adam Sánchez Ayte

Who are the users of AIMS and what do they think about agricultural information management standards? In this section AIMS users from around the world answer five questions on the benefits and use of the AIMS website.

Tell us something about yourself... what is your background and role in the organization you are working for?
I studied mechanical engineering, hold a master's degree in telematics and am currently studying political philosophy. I have been working for 5 years now as a senior developer for Infoandina, the office of communication and information of the Consortium for the Sustainable Development of the Andean Ecoregion (CONDESAN). We develop content management systems for our partners and support them on the use of standards to ensure syntactic and semantic interoperability of their contents.

How did you get in contact with AIMS?
In 2009 I met at the Meeting of Librarians and Agricultural Information Specialists (RIBDA) Valeria Pesce and Imma Subirats of AIMS. They were seeking technical support for the development of the Agridrupal platform. Thanks to their coordination, CONDESAN signed an agreement with AIMS to support each other in developing Agridrupal. I have worked 6 months at the FAO headquarters in Rome where I learned a lot about AGROVOC, information management standards and the semantic web.

What is your opinion on AIMS?
The AIMS team is very dynamic and always up to date with the newest technologies and standards to improve the dissemination of agricultural information of which they keep their members up to date through RSS feeds, tweets and Facebook posts. The tools AIMS offers are constantly evolving, for example, I witnessed how the thesaurus Agrovoc was migrated from a hierarchical to an ontological framework in order to expose data as Linked Data and facilitate its decentralized management. AIMS team members also travel a lot looking for new partnerships to promote local capacity building.

According to you, what is the most important benefit that AIMS provides to the agricultural information management community?
AIMS fullfils a key role in the agricultural information management community. If you want to know what is happening in the world of agricultural information management, you should subscribe to all information services provided by AIMS. If you need a place to share your concerns, you should become a member of one of the many communities that is hosted by AIMS. If you need technical advice on which standard or tool you need to manage your agricultural information then you should contact the AIMS team.

How do you think that information management standards can contribute to agricultural research for development?
The use of standards in agriculture allows scientists to share useful information without having to deal with problems of interoperability. This aspect is fundamental since it accelerates the process of generating knowledge. Agricultural information management standards are equally important from the other side: the users, in the sense that they can easily consume information from different sources in a simplified way.

The scope of the AIMS Newsletter is to bring under the attention of the AIMS community recent news, events and achievements in the field of agricultural information management. If you have any contribution, suggestion, or need assistance with the newsletter, please contact us at [email protected]