Over the past few years, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has been working on the development of semantic standards in metadata and controlled vocabularies in the agricultural domain. At present, there are a number of parallel and dispersed developments in standards, tools and systems for managing agricultural information. The First Consultation on Agricultural Information Management (COAIM), held in 2000, recommended that FAO assume a leading role as a clearinghouse for internationally used information management standards in the agricultural sector.