As part of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) virtual event, Fabrizio Celli from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) presented a webinar on the ‘lessons learned about data discovery, integration and ingestion within AGRIS’ on 22 September. 

The webinar highlighted several challenges to integrate and ingest data from all existing data sources into AGRIS, considering the plethora of data providers from all over the world, like the existence of several metadata formats and different standards in terms of metadata quality. In addition, the webinar dives into the continuous growth of open repositories and the publication of APIs to harvest data, and how AGRIS has started the process of automating the ingestion of data in its database. The adoption of machine learning algorithms (neural networks) and controlled vocabularies like AGROVOC play a key role in content understanding and classification of high-volume data, allowing correct data discovery and integration.