Applying New Trends to the Management of Bibliographic Information on Agriculture

Abstract

With the current rapid developments in the field of information management, it has become important to keep abreast with the new technologies and to apply them appropriately, wherever possible, to improve access to information. This paper gives an outline of the current initiative at FAO that attempts to implement these new technologies with the primary aim of providing improved access to agricultural information. This initiative, which comprises the Agricultural Metadata Element Set (AgMES) and Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS) projects, seeks to provide standards to describe resources in the agricultural domain, by using well-known metadata sets and domain-specific controlled vocabularies, such as thesauri, classification schemes, and ontologies.[1,2] The paper gives a basic overview on the concept of metadata and its importance in facilitating information discovery, and on the use of XML as a platform-independent tool for achieving interoperability between different applications i n the domain of agriculture. The second half of the paper introduces ontologies and describes their usefulness in representing and reusing domain knowledge for providing precise concept-based search results.