about the AOS

There is no doubt that the Web provides a potential platform for global access to information, but there are a number of important issues that need to be addressed for this potential to be fully achieved. The Web was not initially envisioned as a tool for global access to information, and the underlying standards for information management are not entirely adequate. By the very nature of the Internet's architecture, information on similar subjects is scattered across many different servers around the world, yet there are few tools to integrate related information from different sources. As a result, it is often very difficult to find things on the Web.

Such problems can only be solved if action is taken to establish appropriate norms, vocabularies, guidelines and standards to facilitate the integration of data from different sources, and to engage in effective data exchange. Through the adoption of international classification schemes, controlled vocabularies, open standards, and common data models we will eventually overcome many of the information management problems of the Internet; through the development of tools that exploit such standards it will ultimately be possible to provide an effective framework for "one-stop shopping", where people can search for agricultural information resources in one place, without having to explore many different individual websites.

In the agricultural sector there exist already many well-established and authoritative controlled vocabularies, such as FAO's AGROVOC Multilingual Thesaurus, the CAB Thesaurus, and AgNIC, the thesaurus of the National Agricultural Library in the United States. However, for these semantic tools to be entirely effective on the Internet, there is a need to re-assess the traditional "thesaurus" approach and move towards a more modern technique that better suits the Web environment, such as the development of "ontologies". Ontology is a new concept that is emerging from the various Semantic Web initiatives, which roughly speaking can be defined as a semantic system that contains terms, the definitions of those terms, and the specification of relationships among those terms. Such a semantic system can be referred to as an "Ontology Service".

More about the AOS.