Agricultural Information Management Standards

The Normes for the Agricultural Management of Information ( AIMS ) are an initiative started with the United Nations for the food and agriculture (FAO). The general goal of the initiative is to improve the Cohérence among the agricultural systems Informatiques.

The immediate goal of this project is to create a central office for the standards for the management of information. That will contribute to return interoperables the existing or new agricultural computing systems and will allow the coparcenary and the promotion of the adoption of methodologies, standards and applications common. Internet site of AIMS provides lists of instruments to facilitate the interoperablity between the existing agricultural datasets, and of the methods to create new systems which use standards coherent and commonly accepted in the description of information associated with the Agriculture and with the similar fields. The initiative is an collective effort between various agricultural organizations partners who share the common goal to improve coherence among the agricultural computing systems by divided standards and instruments.

Standards and instruments for the management and the coparcenary of information

Standards of metadata

A play of Métadonnée S is composed of elements where each element refers to a label which describes particular information on a Ressource. A resource, here, is defined like " all that has a identité". In the context of the objects of information similar to the documents, a resource could be, for example, a document, a monograph, a page Web, a report/ratio of project, etc AgMES is an initiative which has the goal to relative cover the questions concerning the semantic standards in the field of agriculture to description, with discovered resources, the interworking and the exchange of metadata for the various types of resources of information.

Systems of Organization of Knowledge

There exist currently several systems of organization of the Connaissance (KOS, Knowledge Organization Systems) in the agricultural domain. Most known are listed

repertory KOS
the field covered by the KOS.

Although there exists a plethora of systems of organization of knowledge, there is still the need to formally structure the context and the significance of the terms. A ontology leads the existing systems of organization of knowledge like AGROVOC a step front, by structuring the terms more formally and by providing more relationship between the concepts than those which are currently present in Thesauri. The Agricultural Waiter of Concept is the first step towards a " Service of Ontologie". Ontology is a new concept which emerges from many semantic initiatives of the Web. To summarize, ontology can be defined as a semantic system which contains terms, the definitions of these terms and the specification of reports/ratios among these terms. Such a semantic system can be regarded as a " Service of Ontologie".

Instruments

The instruments of Catalogage join together a summary of known instruments of metadata used to create metadata for various types of resources. It includes instruments to insert and revise the metadata and for the treatment, the extraction, the validation and the observation of the metadata. Some of these instruments present the metadata in various formats, like XML, RDF, XHTML, ISO2709 etc Certains instruments are founded on established standards of metadata whereas others produce metadata based especially on the profiles of local applications.

The instruments of ontology : While working on a project of ontology it is necessary to find an instrument suitable of creation and maintenance of ontology. There are several currently available writers specialized to help in the development process of ontologies. Some instruments can help to acquire, organize, revise, visualize and maintain the knowledge of field like helping in the creation of an ontology. Ontologies are available in various formats: XML/RDF, COMPLETE OWL-FULL, OWL-Lite, etc the majority of the instruments make it possible to import and export ontologies in the various formats, as required by the specific applications of implementation.

The instruments of Thésaurus available free are also listed.

Various instruments, like parsers, are also proposed.

Publications

The most recent publications on the topics covering the agricultural management of information by using standards of metadata, ontologies, diagrams of Classification, etc are available for the Téléchargement Internet site.

Lists of Discussion

Agstandards is a forum established to discuss the standards of metadata and the development of the multilingual thésauri and ontologies.
AGROVOC is a Vocabulaire multilingual structured and controlled, conceived to cover the terminology of the fields of agriculture, sylviculture, fishing, food and fields associated (e.g. Environnement).
AGRIS-Profile of application is a workspace is for the members of community AGRIS who want to export their data towards the central database in the format of XML by using the directives given in the document of AGRIS a.
Webagris: the resource centres of AGRIS are encouraged to modernize their equipment of data capture of preceding ISIS DOS to the new WebAGRIS system. WebAGRIS offers a greater functionality and an environment easier to use. The system uses software WWW-ISIS to publish databases ISIS on the Web.

See too

AGROVOC
Agricultural Service of Ontology
Series of Agricultural Elements of Metadata (AgMES)

External bonds

Series of agricultural elements of metadata

Random links: