In order to provide an aggregated view on the research content coming from various collections, VOA3R is trying to ingest in a harmonised manner the metadata that various content providers use. A main obstacle in this effort is the fact that the various providers use different metadata specifications/standards (such as Dublin Core and MODS) or even different implementations of the same specifications/standards.

To facilitate the process of exposing existing metadata depending on each provider’s development stages, internal data structures, and reality of  practices, a set of recommendations on how bibliographic data could be encoded and exposed were produced with the guidance of FAO. It was decided that these recommendations would allow any content provider to encode bibliographic data using properties from standardized namespaces, to use well-established authority data and controlled vocabularies that are available as linked data in agriculture and aquaculture, and to publish data in RDF triples.

In doing so, aggregators such as VOA3R may act both as a service providers enhancing the dissemination channel and accessibility of bibliographic sources and as a service that promotes the exchange and publication of bibliographic data in RDF, so as to facilitate the use of linked data in agriculture and aquaculture.

In this context, the LODE-BD Recommendations v.1.1 were prepared. In spite of the fact that the recommendations are geared toward the agriculture and aquaculture sectors, the recommendations are destined to become useful for any type of bibliographic data describing bibliographic resources in any subject domain.