Agricultural information management standards

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Agricultural Information Management Standards , abbreviated to AIMS , is an initiative of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations with the common endeavor to improve the coherence between agricultural information systems through common standards and means between the various agricultural partner organizations.

aims

Its aim is to improve the coherence between agricultural information systems. The immediate goal of this project is to create a clearing house for information management standards, which should help to make existing or new agricultural information systems compatible, as well as to promote the adoption of common methodologies, standards and applications. The AIMS website provides lists of means to facilitate interoperability between existing agricultural data series, as well as to create methods for new systems that use uniform and generally accepted standards for describing information in the field of agriculture and similar areas.

Standards and means

Metadata standards

A metadata series is made up of items, each of which relates to a label that describes a specific source of information. A resource is defined here as "anything that has an identity". In connection with document-like information objects (DLIOs), an information source could e.g. B. be a document, a monograph, a website, a project report or something similar. AgMES (Agricultural Metadata Element Series) is an initiative that aims to address questions about semantic standards in the field of agriculture in terms of description, discovery of sources, interoperability and the exchange of metadata for various information resources.

Knowledge organization systems

Several different Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) are used in the field of agriculture. Although there are a variety of knowledge organization systems, it is necessary to formally structure the context and meaning of technical terms. An ontology goes one step further with the existing knowledge organization systems such as AGROVOC by structuring the technical terms more formally and creating more specific relationships between the concepts than those currently available in thesauruses. The Agricultural Concept Server is the first step towards an "ontology service". Ontology is a new term emerging from the various semantic web initiatives that can be broadly defined as a semantic system that includes terms, definitions of those terms, and the specification of relationships between those terms. Such a semantic system can be called an “ontology service”.

Instruments

  • Metadata Cataloging Tools : Collection of well-known metadata tools used to create metadata for different types of resources. It contains tools for entering and editing metadata as well as tools for processing, extracting, evaluating and visualizing metadata. Some of these means allow metadata to be stored in various formats, such as: B. XML, RDF, XHTML, ISO2709 etc. Some instruments are based on established metadata standards, while others generate metadata that are specifically based on local application profiles.
  • Ontology tools: One of the steps in working on an ontology project is to find a suitable ontology development and support tool. There are currently a number of ontology editors that can aid in the process of ontology development. Some instruments can help to acquire, organize, edit, visualize and maintain specialist knowledge and to help with the construction of an ontology. Ontologies are available in different formats: XML / RDF, OWL-Full, OWL-Lite etc. Most instruments offer the possibility to import and export ontologies in different formats.
  • Thesaurus Instruments: A number of commercial thesaurus management instruments are currently available in the market.

Publications

The latest publications on the subject of "Agricultural Information Management", using metadata standards, ontologies, classification schemes, etc., can be downloaded from the website.

Discussion lists

  • AgStandards: A forum set up to discuss metadata standards and the development of multilingual thesauri and ontologies.
  • AGRIS application profile: This workspace is for members of the AGRIS community who want to export their data to the central database in XML format, using the guidelines given in the AGRIS AP document.
  • AGROVOC: AGROVOC is a multilingual, structured and controlled vocabulary for the following subject areas: agriculture, forestry, fishery, nutrition and related areas (e.g. environment).
  • Webagris: AGRIS centers are encouraged to upgrade their data collection equipment from the previous ISIS DOS system to the new WebAGRIS system. WebAGRIS offers greater functionality and better usability. The system uses WWW-ISIS software to publish ISIS databases on the web.

See also

Web links