AIMS

AIMS Newsletter no. 11, July 2012

The New AIMS Website

Mid May a new version of the AIMS website has been released. Modifications have been made on graphical, content and technical level. To improve the usability and accessibility of the site the menu is now based on the main fields of interest of the AIMS team: Open Access, Vocabularies, Metadata, Tools and Linked Data. Each section contains informative pages on the topic or resource, latest news and blog contributions. Most resources are connected to a community of practice where AIMS users can discuss, share and learn. Please let us know what you think at [email protected].

Highlights

AGROVOC 2012 edition released. The AGROVOC Team is pleased to announce the release of the 'AGROVOC 2012 edition'. The new version contains 625,096 terms in 22 languages, among them Malaysian, Telugu, and Turkish. Please explore AGROVOC by searching terms, or browsing hierarchies. AGROVOC 2012 is available for download, and accessible via webservices. More info...

LODE-BD Recommendations 2.0 online available. The second version of the Linked Open Data-enabled Bibliographical Data (LODE-BD) Recommendations has been released and is now online available on AIMS in pdf form. LODE-BD aims to support the selection of appropriate encoding strategies for producing meaningful Linked Open Data (LOD)-enabled bibliographical data (directly or indirectly). More info...

Biotechnology Glossary Explorer released. The Biotechnology Glossary Explorer uses SPARQL queries via AJAX to dynamically query a triple-store containing a SKOS-based glossary, returning titles, definitions and related results in up to six languages. A new version is planed to enhance configurability by supporting hierarchical visualizations and ad-hoc OWL properties. More info...

New AgriOcean DSpace (AOD) function: batch import records in various metadata formats.  AOD 1.1 came with the new function to import records in AGRIS AP, MODS, Endnote and Web of Science RIS files. It is now possible in the submission process to batch import records in the stated metadata formats. More info...

Automatic indexing possible with new version of the AGROVOC Field module for Drupal. A new version (v. 6.3) of the AGROVOC Field module for Drupal 6 has been released with two powerful functionalities for the use of AGROVOC in an information system: automatic indexing and remote/local AGROVOC setting. More info...

Release of the AgINFRA Science Gateway. The AgINFRA Science Gateway, developed by the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) of the University of Catania, meshes-up Grid Computing and Cloud Computing enabled applications and lets users access them in an easy, transparent and ubiquitous way. It comes with two options: a reduced set of services freely accessible and the full fledged application requiring authentication and authorisation. More info...

ASFA thesaurus linked to AGROVOC LOD. The ASFA Thesaurus contains the subject descriptors used to index the records which are contained in the ASFA bibliographic database. ASFA is now linked to AGROVOC LOD, the first and largest linked open data set in the Agricultural domain. More info...

AIMS in Action

Upcoming Events

Glossary

What is Creative Commons? Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001, that promotes the creative reuse of intellectual and artistic works whether owned or in the public domain. Here’s an easy step-by-step guide to choose a license. There are four areas of copyright permissions that you can choose to retain or share:

  • Attribution: Any must attribute your work in the way you have specified.
  • Share-Alike: Any must license their version of your work using the same sort of license that you’ve used.
  • No derivative works: The work cannot be modified in any way.
  • Non-commercial: The work may not be used for commercial purposes.

5 Questions in 5 Minutes with Devika P. Madalli

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 am Associate Professor at the Documentation Research and Training Centre of the Indian Statistical Institute and Adjunct faculty at the Department of  Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Trento, Italy.  I also work as a CO-PI on the research projects ‘Living Knowledge’ and 'AgInfra' funded by the European Commission. I hold a PhD in Knowledge Representation techniques for faceted classificatory systems. My interest lie in the area of Knowledge Organization and application of facetization in Information Systems, Digital Libraries, Semantic Web Technologies, Ontologies, Content Management System, multilingual information representation and e-learning.

How did you get in contact with AIMS? I have been acquainted over the years with the work of the AIMS group in FAO on bibliographic standards and interoperability between agricultural repositories and data sets.

What is your opinion on AIMS? AIMS provides equitable access to agricultural information management resources and is a valuable platform for bringing Agro-communities together through sharing resources.

According to you, what is the most important benefit that AIMS provides to the agricultural information management community? The most important benefit AIMS provides to the AIM community is providing access to free and open source tools for harnessing large amount of data and resources. Moreover millions of resources are sourced and organized by AIMS adhering to world standards, so the AIM communities can access, interact and develop further resources in the domain of agriculture and related fields. The benefit can be best envisaged by imagining the absence of AIMS. How would all such large data sets be made available to agricultural communities worldwide? The answer is that resources would be scattered in different technology platforms, with different vocabulary and non-standard formats and would be not accessible to the community. Hence AIMS brings in the benefit of aggregated information in easy to access mode with embedded world standards.

How do you think agricultural information management standards can contribute to agricultural research for development? The most important benefit that AIMS provides is 'Enabling' and thus 'Empowering' Agricultural scientists, practitioners, academia and researchers by providing seamless access to valuable resources. Such access to research data, reports and case studies will feed into channels that eventually lead to sustainable agriculture and development.

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]

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