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.