AgMES

AgMES is the abbreviation for the Agricultural Metadata Element series (Agricultural Metadata Element Set ). AgMES is that of the Food and Agriculture Organization ( FAO) developed the metadata standard used to describe and search of information resources in the agricultural sector. It provides a series of standard metadata elements available that can be used to describe all types of information resources in the fields of agriculture, forestry, fisheries, food security and other related areas.

There are numerous other metadata schemas for different types of information resources. The following list includes some examples:

  • Documents Related information objects ( DLIOs ): Dublin Core, Agricultural Metadata Element series ( AgMES )
  • Events / Events: vCalendar.
  • Geographical and Regional Information: Metadata Standard for Geographic Information ( ISO19115 ).
  • People: Friend of a friend ( FOAF ), vCard.
  • Plant Production and Protection: Darwin Core ( 1.0 and 2.0) DwC.

The AgMES namespace has been designed to include agro- specific extensions of expressions and improvements fixed standard metadata namespaces such as Dublin Core, AGLS etc.. So in order to apply AgMES on DLIOs eg publications, articles, books, websites and documents, it must be used in conjunction with the standard namespaces previously mentioned. The AgMES initiative strives to achieve improved interoperability between information sources in the agricultural sector, by providing means for exchanging information.

Writing a DLIO by AgMES means to express its main features and its content in a standardized form that can be easily re-used in any information system. Use the more institutions and organizations in the agricultural sector AgMES to describe their DLIOS, the easier it will be to exchange data between information systems such as digital libraries and other collections of agricultural information resources.

Application of AgMES

Metadata about agricultural documents similar information objects ( DLIOs ) can be created and saved in various formats:

  • Inserted into a website ( in an environment such as the HTML meta tag )
  • In a separate metadata database
  • In an XML File
  • In an RDF file

AgMES defines elements that can be used with other metadata standards such as Dublin Core ( DC) or the Australian Government Locator Service ( AGLS ) to describe a DLIO. A complete list of all the elements, improvements and schemes approved by AgMES is available on the AgMES site.

Creating application profiles

Application profiles are defined as schemes, which consists of data elements that are compiled and optimized by one or more name space specifically for a particular client device. All application profiles have the following four characteristics in common:

  • They refer to existing groups of metadata definition standards by extracting proper application or means-tested elements of them.
  • An application profile can not create new elements.
  • Application profiles specify the particulars to an application such as the schemes or controlled vocabularies. An application profile also contains information such as the format of the element value, importance, or the data type.
  • Finally, an application profile explain standardized definitions, provided that they are " semantically closer or more specific" are. This ability of the application profiles provides for situations in which an area-specific terminology is needed to replace more general.

Example application profiles using AgMES

  • The AGRIS Application Profile is a standard created specifically for it to enhance the description, exchange and subsequent retrieval of agricultural documents similar information objects ( DLIOs ). It is a format that allows the sharing of information about dispersed bibliographic systems and it is based on well-known and accepted metadata standards.
  • The event application profile is a standard which was created to allow members of the agricultural community, " to know " about an upcoming event, and to lead them to the event 's website, where they can find more information. The information submitted will be so minimal interoperable far between sectors and organizations.

The AgMES metadata tool

The AgMES metadata tool is a simple application that creates which metadata according to the AgMES standard for websites and other documents related resources. The user has an input mask in which it can assign each element a content. Once you are satisfied with the content of each element, you can simply the created by the tool metadata to the (head ) section of your own HTM (L ) files or copy the complete set of metadata in various formats (HTML, XML, RDF) as a text file save locally. The tool allows one also, existing metadata of an existing Web page to extract and then continue to edit.

AgMES and the semantic web

One of the advantages of the AgMES metadata schema is the ability to establish a connection between the metadata element and controlled vocabularies. The use of controlled vocabularies provides a library indexer (or a search engine programmer) a well-defined set of objects available which can be used for describing and searching of information resources. Often, the values ​​( such as the AGRIS / CARIS classification scheme ) emerge (eg AGROVOC ) or classification schemes from a specific thesaurus.

The use of controlled vocabularies for metadata elements provides the ability to provide the user with exactly those objects available which are suitable for the description. Through the use of URIs and machine- understandable semantics of the potential of controlled vocabularies is exploited in full. In this context, FAO shall circulate the initiative of the Agricultural Ontology Service ( AOS), with the aim to transform the traditional AGROVOC thesaurus into a semantically powerful concept server. This should contain a lot more terminologiesche and semantic information but it will always be possible to obtain traditional systems, such as thesauri.

FOAF (ontology) Agricultural Information Management Standards
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