AIMS is engaged in supporting a number of (in-house and external) projects and initiatives relevant to the semantics, in order to:

• facilitate the supply and exchange of qualitative and interoperable data sets;
• enhance knowledge sharing and reusing;

• forge new bonds of cooperation in the semantic (in agriculture and beyond)  ecosystem,

thus contributing to sustainable agricultural development.

Strategies developed, promoted and advocated by AIMS community - in support of effective data, information and knowledge management and exchange - are focused on:

• descriptive metadata with openly defined and formatted semantics on support of use cases beyond bibliographic indexing;
• open vocabularies, concept schemes and other knowledge organization systems/services (KOS);
• Semantic Web models and tools, including linking open data (LOD);
• recommendations and best practices for (meta)data publishing and usage;
• open (and widely used and globally significant) standards and techniques to facilitate mixing and matching data from different distributed infrastructures.

​To contribute to FAO priorities to share knowledge and information for free in a number of  knowledge domains,  the AIMS community:

• organizes and participates in different events, conferences, meetings and networks (at global, regional and country levels) to share knowledge and novel approaches in the development and implementation of applications and sustanaible infrastructures of interoperable data;

• supports institutions that wish to benefit from initiatives related to (meta)data interoperability and knowledge exchange, in alignment with Semantic Web and, in particular, with LOD principles. “Semantic Technology makes everything connected to anything and helps to build Linked Data through intricate models for representing information” (OntoText).

​​AIMS provides information about (and contributes to updating and maintenance of) the following open semantic products:

1. AGROVOC  multilingual Thesaurus which covers all subject areas related to FAO interest. AGROVOC is releasing more than 30,000 connected (to more than a dozen of other vocabularies) concepts that return standards-based term metadata. Visit a FAO multilingual bibliographic database for agricultural science AGRIS to view how AGROVOC both indexes its content and links it to bibliographic records managed by external repositories. With the publication of AGROVOC as LOD dataset, FAO has not only exposed its first data set in the linked data world, but the largest data set about agriculture that is now out there for public use.

2. Global Agricultural Concept Scheme (GACS) which explores the possibility of creating a global repository of concepts and terminology in the area of agriculture. A GACS pool of concepts is based on a mapping between AGROVOC, the CAB Thesaurus and the NAL Thesaurus. GACS can be seen as the central hub vocabulary for a larger universe of semantic assets (Agrisemantics).  

3. VEST Registry which provides a global map of existing vocabularies for the exchange of data in the field of food and agriculture. This Registry is the continuation of the FAO-AIMS VEST Registry under the GODAN Action umbrella.

4. LODE-BD Recommendations to select appropriate encoding strategies for producing bibliographic data suitable for the Linked Data environment. that provides encoding strategies for producing LOD-enabled bibliographical data as well as the encoding of value vocabularies used in describing agents, places, and topics in bibliographic data.

5. Meaningful Bibliographic Metadata (M2B)  which is a set of recommendations for content providers to select appropriate metadata properties for the creation, management and exchange of meaningful bibliographic information.

6. Agricultural Metadata Element Set (AgMES) namespace which was designed to standardize the description of elements and encoding schemes required for resources such as websites, documents, pictures, databases etc. AgMES elements are used by five application profiles.