FAO launches a project to upgrade its Country Profiles Mapping Information System

In May 2008, FAO approved a project that will provide an upgrade to the FAO Country Profiles Mapping Information System (FCPMIS) launched in 2002. The project aims to enhance users' access to country information on FAO's expertise and increase collaboration among FAO's technical divisions and decentralized offices as well as partners in other organizations.

FAO is involved in the development and dissemination of international standards and procedures for agricultural information management. The new version of the FCPMIS will play an important role in facilitating the adoption of international standards for country and regional data within the FAO and with its external partners to enable data sharing and aggregation.

This project is already underway and at its first stage will create the framework for identifying and fixing outdated or erroneous information in the FCPMIS, in addition, it will foster participation by encouraging the involvement of stakeholders and informing them of the project's workflow.

The planned end date of the project is December 2009. For more information please contact fao-country-profiles@fao.org

  [New Publication] Sharing agricultural events information: When and where is that workshop?

In the last few years a strong need has emerged for a standard way to interchange various types of information, such as on organizations, projects, experts, events and news, in the agricultural
community. This paper focuses on the metadata set for events, the Agricultural Events Application Profile (Ag-Events AP), created specifically to enhance description, exchange and reuse of information on events. The Ag-Events AP provides a minimum interoperability layer through which information about upcoming events related to agriculture can be described, shared and reused. The Ag-Events AP was developed by FAO, in collaboration with its partners,
the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR) and Global Forest Information Service (GFIS), to offer a ،°minimum،± set of metadata elements necessary to share quality descriptions about events. This paper talks about the work done on creating the AP, its use in various applications and the next steps.

  [New publication] Towards a harmonization of metadata application profiles for agricultural learning repositories

Metadata interoperability allows the exchange and preservation of crucial learning and teaching
information, as well as its future reuse among a large number of different systems and repositories. This paper introduces work around metadata interoperability that has taken place in the context of the Agricultural Learning Repositories Task Force (AgLR-TF), an international community of the stakeholders that are involved in agricultural learning
repositories. It particularly focuses on a review and assessment of metadata application profiles that are currently implemented in agricultural learning repositories. The results of this study can
be found useful by who are designing, implementing and operating agricultural learning repositories, facilitating thus metadata interoperability in this application field.

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