It is the continued goal of the International Information System for the Agricultural Science and Technology (AGRIS) to increase the flow and access of information with ease. With this in mind, the AGRIS team is excited to announce the launch of the AGRIS Open Data Set Initiative. Open Data is data that anyone can access, use or share. Open data provides a great opportunity to increase analysis of agricultural performance and, consequently, help inform agriculture investment, innovation and policy to drive changes toward increasing sustainability in the agriculture sector, which matches the goal of living in a world with zero hunger.

Current and future data providers will experience many benefits from the new initiative including:

Increase in visibility of data – with this new initiative, the metadata provided to AGRIS will have the ability to be exposed as Linked Open Data, allowing other institutions, including FAO, the ability to reuse the data to discover new knowledge and enrich the data with other data sources. Even more, the provenance of the data will always be attached to the data itself, giving not only the data increased visibility, but the data provider itself.

Enriching the Data – the entire food and agricultural community has the opportunity to benefit from the AGRIS ODS initiative. Exposing data in an open format allows people to run machine learning algorithms and to use semantic technologies to enrich the data with other data sources including: media, maps and other related sources. With the ability to enrich the data, it is possible to derive new knowledge from combined data sources and patterns in large data volumes, thus again, benefiting the entire community and taking steps closer to a world with zero hunger.

Increase in functionalities of AGRIS website – the new initiative will be used to enrich the functionalities of the AGRIS website, proposing new features and making resources more useful and desirable for end users. New functionalities will include personal pages for the data providers, where it will be possible to access their collection of data, which has been enriched with results of the semantic processing of data itself.

Being part of the AGRIS ODS initiative is an exciting opportunity and opens new doors with a plethora of possibilities. Current data providers interested in joining the new initiative are asked to opt-in here. For more information about becoming an AGRIS data provider, or using the AGRIS platform please visit agris.fao.org or contact [email protected].

Joining the AGRIS ODS initiative is not binding, a data provider can ask to be removed at any time.

About AGRIS

AGRIS is the International systems for Agricultural Science and Technology, a global, multilingual bibliographic database that connects users directly to a rich collection of research and worldwide technical information on food and agriculture.

One of the world’s leading public information services that offers more than 10 million bibliographic records produced by more than 400 data providers including research centers, academic institutions, publishers, governmental bodies, development programmes, international and national organizations from 148 countries. More than 400,000 agricultural and research professionals worldwide access AGRIS resources each month.

Maintained by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), AGRIS has been serving users from developed and developing countries through facilitating access to knowledge in agriculture, science and technology since 1974.