As announced a few days ago. GODAN Action is a 3.5 year project funded by DFID and led by international partners with a strong agriculture, nutrition, data and ICT record including Wageningen UR – Alterra, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR), the Technical Centre for Agriculture and Rural Cooperation (CTA), the Land Portal, AgroKnow, the Open Data Institute (ODI), AidData, the Institute of Development Studies (IDS).

We are now calling on our network of experts because in GODAN Action we’re building a global map of standards relevant to the exchange of agriculture and nutrition data.

We’re building on two existing portals: the AIMS VEST Registry of FAO and the AgroPortal of University of Montpellier / Stanford University, so we aren’t starting from scratch or duplicating efforts. We are relying on the synergies between different partners and initiatives as a basis for the sustainability of the platform. We want this map to be maintained beyond the end of the project, as a common asset of the community working with agricultural and nutrition data.

Now we need your help in completing and improving this map of standards.

We need your help if you:

• are the owner / manager of a standard / vocabulary relevant for food and agriculture-related data;

• know of any standard / vocabulary relevant for food and agriculture-related data that is not currently in the map;

• are an expert in open data standards.

Check the current map:
http://vest.agrisemantics.org

And if you can, help us in any of the following ways:

1. Add new standards that are not in the map yet.
   Click on Contribute: you can register/login (it’s just an access account, we don’t ask for additional information) and once logged in click on “Add vocabulary” under Contribute.

2. “Claim” a standard that is already there and improve its description.
   Once logged in you can click on “Claim” on the standard page and explain what your responsibility is for that standard. We will grant you access to edit the description of that standard.

3. Complete the short survey highlighted on the website.
   This will help us improve the way the map is organised and offer better functionalities.

All those who add or improve the description of a standard, as well as those who complete the survey, will be acknowledged on the website.

We would appreciate it if you could provide your input before 10 September 2016, so that we can move to the second phase of our analysis.

In the next phase, we will call on you again for a better analysis of gaps in the availability and usability of standards: our final objective is to make these standards easier to use and therefore more used in data exchange.

Many thanks to all those who will contribute to the endeavour.