AIMS in Action

Monthly Spotlight

AgriDrupal. Training workshop for ZAR4DIN

WebAgris. Results of the usage survey

AGRIS. Version 2.1 released

Publications. Linked data for fighting global hunger: experiences in setting standards for agricultural information management

More at Communities
 

Upcoming Events

South Africa. 4th African Conference for Digital Scholarship and Curation

USA. International Linked Open Data in Libraries Archives and Museums Summit. LOD-LAM

Italy. Digital Preservation and JHOVE2

USA. 2011 Semantic Technology Conference

Online. 1st Workshop on Semantic Web Technologies for Libraries and Readers

USA. Sixth Annual International Conference on Open Repositories

More at Events Service

AGROVOC published as linked open data and VocBench release

FAO in collaboration with the AGROVOC community and its technical partner MIMOS Berhad has for the first time published its agricultural thesaurus AGROVOC as linked open data (LOD), releasing more than 30,000 connected concepts that return standards-based term metadata.

AGROVOC covers agriculture, forestry, fisheries, nutrition and related areas. Its scope and historic traction gives its URIs the possibility to link all available datasets in its domain area.  The power of AGROVOC as LOD is not only its expression in 20 languages.  AGROVOC LOD is also quickly bridging to other related vocabularies. VocBench is the multi-lingual, vocabulary editing and management tool developed by FAO in collaboration with Kasetsart University in Bangkok and ICRISAT in Hyderabad. It is hosted by MIMOS Berhad. VocBench is designed to handle thesauri, authority lists, classification schemes and glossaries.

With the release of the VocBench and the publication of AGROVOC LOD, FAO and its partners have set an important milestone to create an interoperability infrastructure for agricultural information. Know more about the benefits of AGROVOC LOD and VocBench with the  AGROVOC Team here.

News

Results of the e-consultation on the CIARD Framework for Data and Information Sharing
The e-Consultation was hold from 4 to 15 April at e-agriculture, with the title Building the CIARD Framework for Data and Information Sharing, in preparation for the International Expert Consultation on the theme Building the CIARD Framework for Data and Information Sharing in Beijing from 20 to 23 June 2011.

Building the CIARD Framework for Data and Information Sharing
The Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), in collaboration with the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR), is hosting an International Expert Consultation on the theme Building the CIARD Framework for Data and Information Sharing. The International Consultation is organized by the CIARD partners and will take place from 20 to 23 June 2011 in Beijing (China).

Agricultural Information Management Registry of Vocabularies, Metadata Sets and Tools. The VEST Registry
The VEST Registry is a catalogue of controlled vocabularies, metadata sets and tools managed by the AIMS  team. The scope of the VEST Registry is to provide a clearing house for tools, metadata sets and vocabularies used in food, agriculture, development, fisheries, forestry and natural resources information management context.

First Join Workshop of VOA3R and euroCRIS
VOA3R and euroCRIS  communities are sharing the same view and understanding for improving online repositories and services by harmonized metadata and standardization. Thus it was a natural and logical step to establish a long-term and sustainable cooperation: The joint workshop is a first step on this agreed collaboration and will take place in Bologna on 25th of May 2011.

More news at Of Interest

5 Questions in 5 Minutes with Valeria Pesce

Who are the users of AIMS and what do they think about agricultural information management standards? In this section AIMS users from all 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 work for the Global Forum on Agricultural Research(GFAR)  as information management specialist. As for my background, after my degree (which is completely unrelated to what I do now), I received formal education and professional training as a librarian and as a computer programmer, after which, I have worked first as programmer and then information management specialist. In GFAR, I work under the "knowledge for all" pillar, focusing on issues related to information exchange and information flows. I am currently managing the CIARD RING service. 

How did you get in contact with AIMS?
In GFAR, I have worked extensively on metadata standards and protocols for managing and exchanging information between systems, in strict collaboration with the OEKCS group in FAO. My first contact with this group actually took place when we at GFAR decided to implement a document repository following FAO's standards and looked at the AIMS website for getting all the technical information about standards.

What is your opinion on AIMS?
Very positive, I use it regularly, especially now that there is a platform for communities working in agricultural information management.

According to you, what is the most important benefit that AIMS provides to the agricultural information management community?
The fact that AIMS is the only reference point and "authority" for agricultural information management standards. As an example, in the RING service we needed to set up a reference list of metadata sets and one of KOS, to be used as indexing criteria for the services registered in the system. Instead of creating new lists or duplicating the lists from AIMS, we simply considered AIMS as the authority for this and we synchronized the lists on the RING with the directories on AIMS (now the "VEST Registry") through the use of RSS feeds. A good example of interoperability!

How do you think that information management standards can contribute to agricultural research for development?
Agricultural research and innovation require easy access to timely and relevant information of different types, coming from different sources and integrated in a meaningful way. The real-time aggregation and integration of information from different sources is made possible only by the use of standards and related technologies for interoperability.

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]