 FAO launches a project to upgrade its Country Profiles Mapping Information System
22 August 2008 - 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This project is already underway and at its first stage will create the framework for identifying and fixing outdated or erroneous information in the FCPMIS, in addition, it will foster participation by encouraging the involvement of stakeholders and informing them of the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] Towards a harmonization of metadata application profiles for agricultural learning repositories
6 August 2008 - 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.
[New Publication] Sharing agricultural events information: When and where is that workshop?
6 August 2008 - 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] The AGROVOC Concept Server Workbench: A collaborative tool for managing multilingual knowledge
25 July 2008 - Ontology plays an important role in the enhancement performance of systems, addressing issues such as knowledge sharing, knowledge aggregation as well as information retrieval and question answering. This paper presents the AGROVOC Concept Server Workbench (ACSW) for multilingual ontological concept construction and maintenance. The ACSW is a web 2.0 based application consisting of two main functionalities that are user management and ontological knowledge management (i.e. concept, scheme, relationship, export, search, validate and consistency check) in order to maintain the knowledge acquisition life-cycle in food and agriculture domain. Knowledge is stored in the form of multilingual concept hierarchy and also kept in the OWL format in order to exchange between machines and to do reasoning. This workbench uses Prot¨¦g¨¦ API as an OWL framework. Moreover the Ontology Game conceptual framework is also presented in order to acquire ontology terms more pleasant.
First Call For Papers - SWAP 2008
16 July 2008 - 5th Workshop on Semantic Web Applications and Perspectives
FAO-UN, Rome, Italy (15-17 December 2008)
The Semantic Web is currently one of the most interesting and ambitious challenges that the scientific and technological community is facing. While great progresses have been made in terms of consolidation of base philosophy and infrastructure, new issues, technologies and tools are emerging.
These issues include creating, presenting and managing Semantic Web content, making semantics explicit in order to automatically integrate data from different sources, and to search for information based on its meaning rather than its syntactic form.
New and advanced methods, models, tools, and technologies for services related to creation, access, retrieval, integration, and filtering of Web content are being developed at the intersection of relevant disciplines that are making the Semantic Web fly, such as Artificial Intelligence, Databases, Distributed Computing, Multimedia Systems, Natural Language Processing, and Human-Computer Interaction.
For more information visit the related Web site.
[New publication] The AGROVOC concept server: rationale, goals and usage
8 July 2008 - The main objective of the AGROVOC Concept Server (CS)is to create a collaborative reference platform and a one-stop shop for a pool of commonly used concepts related to agriculture, containing terms, definitions and relationships between terms in multiple languages derived from various sources. This paper aims to address the issues.
Full access to 2426 articles and publications, now available at http://www.fao.org/agris/search
30 June 2008 - The latest AGRIS Search Engine update includes important data from the SciELO Network, a major online repository of Latin America and Caribbean scientific journals. The AGRIS collection is enriched with the first bunch of articles harvested from the Brazilian Open Archives Data Provider and they all include links to the full text. The first 1758 articles on agricultural sciences can be easily retrieved by accessing this link:
http://www.fao.org/agris/search/search.do?query=%2Bcenter%3A%28XS%29&method=Search
Other interesting agricultural data subsets have been published that are coming from the FAO catalogue and two AGRIS Resource centers whose data was missing for some time. These are INIA/CENIAP Venezuela and ICAR in India. Their data can be retrieved using the Search Assistant and selecting the relevant AGRIS Centre name and applying other filters as needed.
[New publication] Achieving OAI PMH compliancy for CDS/ISIS databases
23 June 2008 - This paper was already announced in 2007, but we announce it again as it has now been published in the Emerald journal. The main purpose of this paper is to present the work carried out by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in collaboration with Associazione per la documentazione le biblioteche e gli archivi (DBA) in Italy to make web CDS/ISIS-based applications compliant with the OAI-PMH. CDS/ISIS is an Integrated Storage and Information Retrieval System of Unesco, which is widely used especially in Latin America and Africa.
FAODOC full text documents are now freely accessible from the Universal Digital Library!
4 June 2008 - The Universal Digital Library (UDLIB) is a result of the Million book project making free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books, available to everyone over the Internet. It is now granting open access to online available documents from FAODOC, including 9742 books, 4762 and analytics from books, 3297 journal articles and some Web resources, field documents etc. The documents can currently be consulted through the mirror site in the United States. Shortly all other mirrors will be updated accordingly and documents will be browsable at www.ulib.org.
[New publication] Emerging issues, priorities and commitments in e-agriculture
29 May 2008 - Dr. Anton Mangstl, Director of FAO's Knowledge Exchange and Capacity Building Division, explains that only through the commitment of policy makers can we truly realize the benefits of e-agriculture for the developing world - and in particular the rural poor.
[New publication] Agricultural information management standards website: an initiative to facilitate interoperability and improve coherence
29 May 2008 - Over the past few years, the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has been
working on the development of semantic standards in
metadata and controlled vocabularies in the agricultural domain. At present, there are a number of parallel and dispersed developments in standards, tools and systems for managing agricultural information.
The aim of the Agricultural Information Management Standards (AIMS) website is to disseminate
different standards and other information to
support these standards.
[New publication] Analysis of e-agriculture survey
29 May 2008 - In late 2006, an online global survey to determine the scope and priorities for the WSIS Action line on e-Agriculture was conducted by an inter-agency Working Group. Most of the over 3400 respondents were unfamiliar with the term 'e-Agriculture; but nearly all respondents had suggestions on potential definition and benefits, as well as on priority areas for action. Perceptions of e-Agriculture focused on information and communication processes more than on technologies and tools. Subject areas mentioned included farming practices, market information, training, statistics, and science/research. Stakeholder
groups identified included producers, rural service providers, scientists, and policy makers. Benefits included both generally enhanced information exchange and communication processes and specifically agriculture-related benefits such as market access and food security. e-Agriculture was also seen to contribute to broader development goals. Future priorities included developing virtual communities and networks, capacity building in the use and application of ICT, and defining and advocating e-Agriculture initiatives.
AgriFeeds has a new "Global Issues" section!
23 May 2008 - AgriFeeds has recently introduced a new functionality to provide customised multilingual feeds on current Global Issues. This service provides ready to use news feeds on subjects of current interest such as Biofuels, Avian Flu, Transboundary Diseases and Hunger. AgriFeeds, the agricultural news and events aggregator, can be used to browse and filter news and events from several agricultural information sources. Furthermore, it allows creation of customised feed that can be easily read with a feed reader or embedded into a Web site.
Another step for FAO towards Semantic Web (requires installation of Firefox add-ons)
16 May 2008 - The articles published on the Food, Nutrition and Agriculture (FNA) Web now make use of Semantic Web techniques such as RDFa (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/). The selected articles connect the user with information retrieved from other well known Web sites such as Amazon, Del.icio.us, Flickr and YouTube, in order to obtain links to books, pictures and videos of other resources relevant to the articles themselves. In addition to this, if more information about the authors is available, the revised Web site allows to automatically view their pictures and add them as contacts in Outlook or Yahoo contact lists. By using RDFa or other microformats, the articles of the FNA Web site have become more "interactive" with the Web, and their content can be employed to help the user find materials related to them. This new technique of interaction with the Web pages is accessible by specific tools or browsers plug-ins, such as the Firefox add-ons like Fozzbot.
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