Information Management Software

Electronic Information Management System (EIMS)
News and Events Management System (NEMS)
CAMS (WAICENT Conferencing and Messaging Service)
WebAGRIS

Electronic Information Management Software (EIMS)

EIMS is an integrated system for managing electronic publishing workflow and cataloguing keywords and meta-data within agricultural publications, WebPages, images and video. WAICENT began using EIMS in 1999 when it was given the ambitious task of converting FAO’s wealth of accumulated knowledge into the HTML format. Currently most of FAO’s departments as well as its network of offices around the world are using the EIMS system in order to manage the organization’s vast information output

Publishing workflow

Workflow is managed through a web interface allowing for complete decentralization of the publishing process.

Author

• Creates a record with related keywords and meta-data, uploads related files - books, meeting documents, images, WebPages, - and sends file and record to approver

Approver

• Views/modifies record and approves

Publisher

• Publishes the record on the web and releases related electronic files - books, meeting documents, images, WebPages - into FAO’s Corporate Document Repository
• Accesses information using keyword and meta-data searches through the Corporate Document Repository or the WAICENT Information Finder which is based on the meta-data used in EIMS

EIMS is multi-lingual so an author can insert a record in French, Spanish, Arabic and Chinese as well as English. The use of multilingual thesauri ensures that the object is classified independently from the language used in assigning keywords and categories. Created in-house by WAICENT, EIMS can be customized according to the internal needs and structure of any organization or institution.

The Electronic Information Management System (EIMS) has been developed by WAICENT for use in FAO and now available to agricultural institutions, ministries, NGOs and farmers associations.

News and Events Management System (NEMS)

NEMS is a dynamic multi-lingual, web-publishing system especially suited to websites with listings and news areas that require frequent updates. NEMS is used by an increasing number of FAO departments as well as the WAICENT site.

The standard publishing workflow for NEMS defines three users but can be tailored to the needs of a particular institution or department.

Editor: enters news items, events and course information into NEMS which automatically converts into HTML. The information is sent through the web interface to the translator or straight to the publisher.

Translator: translates information and sends to publisher

Publisher: revises information, returns to editor or publishes directly on web page without the need of a web editor to convert into HTML

NEMS is a decentralized system that allows any authorized user anywhere in the world to enter content. The dynamic web page created by NEMS automatically updates when news items, events and courses are published. NEMS contains a search engine that allows users to look for archived news items, events or courses by using keywords, dates, country names or themes. The system is multilingual so that content can be entered and managed in English, French, Spanish, Arabic and Chinese.

NEMS can also be tailored to generate XML, a sophisticated mark-up language that has become an industry standard for exchanging information.

The News and Events Management System has been developed by WAICENT for use in FAO and now available to agricultural institutions, ministries, NGOs and farmers associations.

Download NEMS Manual for WFD

NEMS system demonstration

Nems is currently being used by:
FAO - Fisheries
FAO - Forestry
International Year of Mountains
Short Courses in Forestry and Related Subjects
World Food Day
Special Programme for Food Security
Waicent
Achira - Redcapa
Biotechnology
Portal FAO - España
Food for the cities
LEAD
World Food Summit five years later: From the podium
FAO Representations web sites: Cuba, Costa Rica

Contact NEMS at Nems@fao.org

CAMS (WAICENT Conferencing and Messaging Service)

CAMS (WAICENT Conferencing and Messaging Service) is a Web Conferencing tool that is different from others in that CAMS lets both moderators and users not only access standard postings but also upload and download various document formats, as such, it’s an ideal tool for collaborative working.

What is Web Conferencing?

Web conferencing is an electronic forum whereby users can post messages (i.e. leave messages on the system to be read by others), create discussion areas or reply to other user’s messages. All this is done in "asynchronous-time". In other words, conference messages (i.e Posted or Replied Messages) on the system are time-independent meaning. The user does not have to be online at the moment a message is posted (or even a member of the forum), in order to be able to read it at a later date.

Different kinds of users, different rights and responsibilities

• The casual visitor to a public CAMS conference does not even have to log in, depending on the requirements of the forum owner, they may even have the ability to post messages.
• Users who self register have the additional facility of being able to customize their CAMS experience, by selecting a default language and possibly a skin at logon. They can subscribe to conferences, and opt to receive email notification of various kinds of activities in the Forums. Moderators can subscribe registered users to private topics.
• Topic Moderators are responsible for the content of individual topics, they can not only manage both the message content, publishing and un-publishing, editing and changing the importance of messages, but also controlling the availability of files in the topic’s file sharing area.
• Forum Owners, in addition to the role of the topic moderators, can also add and remove topics from their forum, and assign users and moderators to the topics.
• The System Administrator creates forums, and is responsible for the smooth running of the entire system.

Almost all the functions required for the smooth running a CAMS installation can be carried out through the web.

CAMS Highlights

• Threads, making up the fabric of a messaging session. CAMS displays as a message tree the logical flow of the discussion. A thread is made of an initial message, and the follow-up messages (and the replies to the follow-ups etc.) The user can easily see which messages is a reply to which.
• Framework available in three languages. Although the content of the message is not translated. The user can choose the language (from English, French and Spanish) of the framework (all the text, prompts and buttons)
• Public and Private topics. Reflecting life, some discussions are best held in an open forum, others in closed private rooms. CAMS supports both these types of discussions, public topics where anyone can read and post, and private topics where the forum owner or moderator can select who can see the messages and post new ones.
• Moderated and Un-moderated discussions. Guiding discussions can help keep the conversations to the point and productive. While CAMS supports un-moderated discussions, perhaps the best modality for an open forum is through moderation, each message is not published until the moderator approves it. Un-moderated forums works well in small private discussions.
• Email integration and notification.
To save users time, CAMS can be configured to send out brief email notifying them of forum activity, that way they don’t have to log in every day to see what’s new, details of activity can arrive in the users email inbox.

The WAICENT Conference and Messaging Service (CAMS) has been developed by WAICENT for use in FAO and now available to partners

CAMS is a tool developed by WAICENT and available for agricultural institutions: ministries, NGOs, farmers associations, etc. free of charge.

WebAGRIS

WebAGRIS is a complete, multilingual Web-based system for distributed data input, processing and dissemination (through the Internet or on CD-Rom), of agricultural bibliographic information. WebAGRIS also allows to link to documents that are available in electronic format. It is based on common standards of data input (meta-data standard data structure), and dissemination formats (export formats (XML, HTML, ISO2709)), as well as subject categorization schema and thesauri, i.e. AGROVOC.

Depending on the "architecture" of the production process and resources WebAGRIS can be used either as a local application or in a joint collection of information (through exporting, harvesting data, etc.).

Each AGRIS network participating centre can choose to host a Web site for inputting, searching and/or sending data to the central AGRIS database for publishing on CD-Rom. WebAGRIS improves accessibility of information generally, through the use of multi-database or multihost searching and harvesting.

The current version of WebAGRIS uses WWW-ISIS software, prepared by the Institute for Computer and Information Engineering (ICIE,rybinski@mimuw.edu.pl ), Poland, in close cooperation with FAO-Waicent, FAO-Agris-Caris@fao.org. The interface is based on HTML forms, and has been implemented as a CGI program. The program is invoked by the WEB server process. The access to the CDS/ISIS databases is managed through BIREME's software ISIS-DLL, an API (Application Program Interface) for CDS/ISIS software of UNESCO in the Windows environment.

WebAGRIS ensures:

1. Database maintenance functions (data entry and update):password control; creation of new records; updating of existing records (selection from a list); validation by formats; display of authority data for a selection
2. Information dissemination functions: user friendly retrieval; sort, print and export options; searching through a number of databases; result paging; saving option for query history, etc.

The beta2 version is now available and can be installed by running the setup. Please go to ftp site at:
ext-ftp.fao.org/agris/ in directory software/wwwisis/agris