1. Existing provision for resource discovery, and future needs

• What needs to be done to improve existing Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs such as thesauri, classifications, etc.)?
• What tools does the agricultural/fisheries/food & nutrition/forestry/sustainable development/veterinary information ‘service’ community need to promote resource discovery?
• In order to describe a particular resource appropriately for different types of users or applications, do we need to ‘index and code’ differently from the past? (This relates to the ‘granularity’ of the description logic).

2. AOS service provision

• Should the AOS exist as:

1. a server/service which holds and relates existing (and updateable) KOSs so that they can be used on their own or viewed/used in relation to each other?
2. a server/service which permits users to ‘pick and mix’ terms (+ definitions) and their relationships so as to be able to construct ‘new’ ontologies?
3. or both? d) or different?

• If the AOS Project develops as a series of subprojects, what priority would you attach to particular aspects of functionality and/or deliverables (such as KOS interoperability/mapping, machine-to-machine communication, multilingual access, natural language processing, etc.)? If need be, should the emphasis be on (relatively ‘quick’) focused development within a specific domain (say, forestry) or (relatively slow) broad-front advance in all areas under the AOS Project ‘umbrella’?
• How should the ‘domain’ areas be related to each other in the AOS? Should they develop ‘autonomously’ or ‘interactively’? What are ‘useful’ domain areas for the AOS? How should ‘subdomains’ and overlap areas be handled?

3. AOS structure & management

• What sort of relationships would you like to see in the AOS ontology/ontologies?

• Given the need to provide for sustainable maintenance and development of the AOS, what are the potential mechanisms whereby this could be achieved? What are the issues? What management structures would need to be in place for you to have confidence in the long-term future of the AOS?

• How important is it that there are quality controls for distributed inputs of terminology, definitions, relationships and authority files? Under what circumstances would distributed inputting be feasible?

• Would a centrally organised taxonomy help to achieve consistency of description logic for different applications, i.e. content management systems, web intranets, web services, legacy data, auto classification tools?

• Should there be a centrally agreed classification underpinning the AOS? Ought there to be a centrally agreed standard for resource description (in the areas covered by the AOS)? How does this ‘square’ with the idea that thesauri should develop independently for their own purpose?
• How often should the AOS be updated? How important is it to hold version information? How should this be handled?

4. AOS users and the tools available to them

• Who should the prime target user community of the AOS be? i.e. system developers (as UMLS)? information professionals? other? Should there be no single ‘prime’ target user?

• What tools would you like to see associated with the AOS?

• What features would you like to see on AOS interfaces? [Does the AOS provide a search engine, and/or a thesaurus/ontology integration tool for a search engine?]

• Should the AOS provide tools for authors/web editors to use to describe their own content?

• If the AOS was available and functional, would you a) contribute your own KOSs to it (or make other forms of contribution)?, b) use it? How?