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Information sharing in agriculture: the CIARD perspective and FAO´s contribution to it

Year of publication 2011

Place of publication Rome, Italy ;

Pages 14

Product type Document

Edition 1

Synopsis (short abstract) In an ideal world all data would be produced using open formats and would be linked directly to other related data on the web. This would give the possibility for service providers to set up information systems by mixing and matching data from different distributed repositories. A scenario like this is no science fiction. Nevertheless most data (of all kinds) resides in database and repository silos, and efforts to create one stop access to distributed data lack functionalities, robust ness or sustainability. The CIARD initiative1 is working to make agricultural research information publicly available and accessible to all, by acting on both those issues. Among its actions are advocating and promoting open access, improving applicability and enabling effective use of data and information in agricultural research and innovation. In this paper we present the CIARD initiative and concentrate on FAO’s contribution to it. We present the Linked Data approach, the vocabul ary editor VocBench, the domain specific tagger AgroTagger and the RING registry of services and tools.

Language English

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    The CIARD RING, an infrastructure for interoperability of agricultural research information services 2010
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    Creating integrated information services in agriculture giving access and adding value to information residing in distributed sources remains a major challenge. In distributed architectures, value added services by definition interface several information sources / services. Therefore value added services cannot be built without an awareness of what others have done: which sources are available, how to tap into them, how to exploit their semantics. The Coherence in Information for Agricultur al Research for Development (CIARD) Routemap to Information Nodes and Gateways (RING) is a portal offering an interlinked registry of existing information services in agriculture. The CIARD RING covers both information services and sources: in nowadays information architectures, the distinction between the two is very fluid. In the RING, the definition of "service" includes any form of providing information from one server instance (website, mail server, web services, XML archive...) to many c lients (browsers, email clients, news readers, harvesters...) The services registered in the RING are described in details and categorized according to criteria that are relevant to the use of the service and its interoperability. The RING categorizes and interlinks the featured services according to criteria such as: standards adopted, vocabulary used, technology used, protocols implemented, level of interoperability etc. In addition, it features detailed instructions on how the registered se rvices can be "interoperated". The vision is that the RING will become the common global technical platform for the community of agricultural information professionals for accessing, sharing and exchanging information through web services. This paper describes how the RING provides an infrastructure for enhancing interoperability of information sources and thus paves the way towards better accessibility of information through value-added and better targeted services.
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