Agricultural Information Management Standards

Agricultural information management standards, abbreviated AIMS, one of the Food and Agriculture Organization ( FAO) is to improve the United Nations outgoing, initiative with the common desire to ensure coherence between agricultural information systems through common standards and resources between the various agricultural partner organizations.

Objectives

It aims to improve the coherence between agricultural information systems. The immediate goal of this project is to create a clearing house for information management standards that will help to make existing or new agricultural information systems compatible, and to promote the inclusion of common methodologies, standards and applications. The AIMS website provides lists with means for users to facilitate interoperability between existing agricultural data series, as well as to provide methods for new systems, use the uniform and generally accepted standards for the description of information in the field of agriculture and related areas.

Standards and means

Metadata standards

A metadata - series consists of elements where each element refers to a label that describes a specific source of information. A resource is defined herein as " anything that has identity ." In the context of document- like information objects ( DLIOs ) could be a source of information eg a document, a monograph, a website, be a project report or similar. AgMES ( Agricultural Metadata Element Series) is an initiative that aims to take up questions about semantic standards in the field of agriculture as regards the description, discovery of sources, interoperability and exchange of metadata for various information resources.

Knowledge organization systems

In the field of agriculture several different knowledge organization systems are used ( Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS ) ). Although there are a variety of knowledge organization systems, it is still necessary to structure the relationship and the meaning of technical terms formally. An ontology is at the existing knowledge organization systems, such as AGROVOC a step further by formal structures the technical terms and specific relationships between the concepts creates, than those who are currently in thesauri available. The Agricultural Concept Server is the first step to a " Ontology Service". Ontology is a new term that emerges from the various semantic web initiatives, which can be roughly defined as a semantic system that contains technical terms, definition of these technical terms and the specification of relationships between those technical terms. Such a system may be referred to as a semantic " ontology service ."

Instruments

  • Instruments for cataloging metadata: Summary of known meta - instruments, which are used for creation of metadata for different types of resources. It includes tools for entering and editing metadata and tools for processing, extracting, evaluating, and visualizing metadata. Some of these funds will allow metadata in different formats, such as XML, RDF, XHTML, ISO2709, etc. play. Some instruments are based on established metadata standards, while creating other metadata that are based on specific local application profiles.
  • Ontology tools: To work on a project ontology is one of the steps to find a suitable ontology development and support tool. There are currently a number of ontology editors that can help in the process of ontology development. Some instruments can help to acquire the Knowledge to organize, edit, visualize and maintain as well as to assist in building an ontology. Ontologies are available in different formats: XML / RDF, OWL Full, OWL -Lite, etc. Most tools provide the ability to import and export ontologies in different formats.
  • Thesaurus Instruments: A number of commercial thesaurus management tools is currently available on the market.

Publications

Recent publications on the topic ' Agricultural Information Management ', using metadata standards, ontologies, classification schemes, etc. can be downloaded from the website.

Discussion lists

  • AgStandards: A forum has been established to discuss metadata standards and the development of multilingual thesauri and ontologies.
  • AGRIS Application Profile: This working space is for members of the AGRIS community who wish to export their data to the central database in XML format, using the given in the AGRIS AP document policies.
  • AGROVOC: AGROVOC is a multilingual, structured and controlled vocabulary for the following areas: agriculture, forestry, fisheries, food and related areas (eg environment).
  • Webagris: AGRIS Centres are encouraged to update their data collection devices from the previous ISIS DOS system to the new WebAGRIS system. WebAGRIS provides greater functionality and better usability. The system uses WWW - ISIS software to publish ISIS databases on the web.
Agricultural Ontology Service
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