Agricultural Information Management Standards
abbreviated to AIMS is a space for accessing and discussing agricultural information management standards, tools and methodologies connecting information workers worldwide to build a global community of practice. Information management standards, tools and good practices can be found on AIMS: * to support the implementation of structured and linked information and knowledge to enable institutions and individuals from different technical backgrounds to build open and interoperable information systems; * to provide advice on how to best manage, disseminate, share and exchange agricultural scientific information; * to promote good practices widely applicable and easy to implement, and; * to foster communities of practices centered on interoperability, reusability and cooperation.

Users

AIMS is primarily intended for information workers—librarians, information managers, software developers—but is also of interest to those who are simply passionate about knowledge and information sharing. The success of AIMS depends upon its communities reaching a critical mass to show that the investment in interoperability standards has a return.

Community

AIMS hold
9 communities of practice
They are intended to discuss and share information about the different ongoing initiatives under the AIMS umbrella. AIMS supports collaboration through forums and blogs amongst institutions and individuals that wish to share expertise on how to use tools, standards and methodologies. Moreover, news and events are published on AIMS as part of its ‘one-stop” access to interoperability and reusability of information resources. The AIMS communities are aimed at the global agricultural community, including information providers, from research institutes, academic institutions, educational and extension institutions and also the private sector.

Content

Vocabularies

AGROVOC AGROVOC is a multilingual controlled vocabulary covering all areas of interest of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), including food, nutrition, agriculture, fisheries, forestry and the environment. By November 2021 ...

is a comprehensive multilingual vocabulary that contains close to 40,000 concepts in over 20 languages covering subject fields in agriculture, forestry and fisheries together with cross-cutting themes such as land use, rural livelihoods and food security. It standardizes data description to enable a set of core integration goals: interoperability, reusability and cooperation. In this spirit of collaboration,

also works with other organizations that are using

Linked Open Data In computing, linked data (often capitalized as Linked Data) is structured data which is interlinked with other data so it becomes more useful through semantic queries. It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP, RDF and URIs, but r ...

techniques to connect vocabularies and build the backbone of the next generation of internet data; data that is marked up not just for style but for meaning. It is maintained by a global community of librarians, terminologists, information managers and software developers usin
VocBench
a multilingual, web-based vocabulary editor and workflow management tool that allows for simultaneous, distributed editing. * In addition to AGROVOC, AIMS provides access to other vocabularies like the

Geopolitical ontology The FAO geopolitical ontology is an ontology developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to describe, manage and exchange data related to geopolitical entities such as countries, territories, regions and other si ...

an
Fisheries Ontologies
The

is used to facilitate data exchange and sharing in a standardized manner among systems managing information about countries and/or regions. The network of fisheries ontologies was created as a part of th
NeOn Project
and it covers the following areas: Water areas: for statistical reporting, jurisdictional ( EEZ), environmental (LME), Species: taxonomic classification, ISSCAAP commercial classification, Aquatic resources, Land areas, Fisheries commodities, Vessel types and size, Gear types,

, ASFA. * AgMES is as a namespace designed to include agriculture specific extensions for terms and refinements from established standard metadata namespaces like

Dublin Core 220px, Logo image of DCMI, which formulates Dublin Core The Dublin Core, also known as the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES), is a set of fifteen "core" elements (properties) for describing resources. This fifteen-element Dublin Core has ...

or AGLS, used for Document-like Information Objects, for example like publications, articles, books, web sites, papers, etc. * Linked Open Data (LOD) - Enabled Bibliographic Dat
(LODE-BD) Recommendations 2.0
are a reference tool that assists bibliographic data providers in selecting appropriate encoding strategies according to their needs in order to facilitate metadata exchange by, for example, constructing crosswalks between their local data formats and widely used formats or even with a

Linked Data In computing, linked data (often capitalized as Linked Data) is structured data which is interlinked with other data so it becomes more useful through semantic queries. It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP, RDF and URIs, but ...

representation

Tools

AgriDrupal
is both a suite of solutions for agricultural information management and a community of practice around these solutions. The AgriDrupal community is made up of people who work in the community of agricultural information management specialists and have been experimenting with IM solutions in Drupal.
AgriOcean DSpace
is a joint initiative of the

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be a centre for harmoniz ...

agencies of

FAO The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)french: link=no, Organisation des Nations unies pour l'alimentation et l'agriculture; it, Organizzazione delle Nazioni Unite per l'Alimentazione e l'Agricoltura is an intern ...

and

UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. It ...

-IOC/IODE to provide a customized version of

DSpace DSpace is an open source repository software package typically used for creating open access repositories for scholarly and/or published digital content. While DSpace shares some feature overlap with content management systems and document manag ...

. It uses standards for metadata,

thesauri A thesaurus (plural ''thesauri'' or ''thesauruses'') or synonym dictionary is a reference work for finding synonyms and sometimes antonyms of words. They are often used by writers to help find the best word to express an idea: Synonym dictionar ...

and other

controlled vocabularies Control may refer to: Basic meanings Economics and business * Control (management), an element of management * Control, an element of management accounting * Comptroller (or controller), a senior financial officer in an organization * Controlling ...

for oceanography,

marine science Oceanography (), also known as oceanology and ocean science, is the scientific study of the oceans. It is an Earth science, which covers a wide range of topics, including ecosystem dynamics; ocean currents, waves, and geophysical fluid dyna ...

, food, agriculture, development, fisheries,

forestry Forestry is the science and craft of creating, managing, planting, using, conserving and repairing forests, woodlands, and associated resources for human and environmental benefits. Forestry is practiced in plantations and natural stands. ...

natural resources Natural resources are resources that are drawn from nature and used with few modifications. This includes the sources of valued characteristics such as commercial and industrial use, aesthetic value, scientific interest and cultural value. ...

and other related sciences.
VocBench
is a web-based multilingual vocabulary management tool developed by

and hosted by MIMOS Berhad. It transforms thesauri, authority lists and glossaries into

SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a W3C recommendation designed for representation of thesauri, classification schemes, taxonomies, subject-heading systems, or any other type of structured controlled vocabulary. SKOS is part of the ...

/ RDF concept schemes for use in a linked data environment. VocBench also manages the workflow and editorial processes implied by vocabulary evolution such as user rights/roles, validation and versioning. VocBench supports a growing set of user communities, including the global, distributed group of terminologists who manage

.
WebAGRIS
is a multilingual Web-based system for distributed data input, processing and dissemination (through the Internet or on CD-Rom), of agricultural bibliographic information. It is based on common standards of data input and dissemination formats (

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable ...

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaSc ...

, ISO2709), as well as subject categorization schema and

Services

AgriFeeds
is a service that allows users to search and filter news and events from several agricultural information sources and to create custom feeds based on the filters applied. AgriFeeds was designed in the context o
CIARD
(Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research for Development). Within CIARD, the partners who designed and implemented AgriFeeds are

and GFAR. AgriFeeds is currently maintained by

. *

AGRIS AGRIS (International System for Agricultural Science and Technology) is a global public domain database with more than 12 million structured bibliographical records on agricultural science and technology. It became operational in 1975 and the data ...

is a global public domain database with nearly 3 million structured bibliographical records on agricultural science and technology. The database is maintained by

, with the content provided by more than 100 participating institutions from 65 countries.
CIARD Routemap to Information Nodes and Gateways (RING)
is a project implemented within CIARD and is led by GFAR. The RING is a global registry of web-based services that give access to any kind of information pertaining to agricultural research for development (ARD). It allows information providers to register their services in various categories and so facilitate the discovery of sources of agriculture-related information across the world. * Since January 2011, AIMS supports E-LIS, the international electronic

archive An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials – in any medium – or the physical facility in which they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or ...

for library and information science (LIS). E-LIS is established, managed and maintained by an international team of 73 librarians and information scientists from 47 countries and support for 22 languages. It is freely accessible, aligned with the Open Access (OA) movement and is a voluntary enterprise. Currently it is the largest international repository in the LIS field. Searching or browsing E-LIS is a kind of multilingual, multicultural experience, an example of what could be accomplished through open access archives to bring the people of the world together.
VEST Registry
is a catalog of controlled vocabularies (such as authority files, classification systems, concept maps, controlled lists, dictionaries,

ontologies In computer science and information science, an ontology encompasses a representation, formal naming, and definition of the categories, properties, and relations between the concepts, data, and entities that substantiate one, many, or all domains ...

or subject headings); metadata sets ( metadata element sets, namespaces and application profiles); and tools (such as library management software, content management systems or document repository software). It is concerned primarily with collecting and maintaining a consistent set of metadata for each resource. The scope of the VEST Registry is to provide a clearing house for tools, metadata sets and vocabularies used in food,

agriculture Agriculture or farming is the practice of cultivating plants and livestock. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled people t ...

, development, fisheries,

and

information management context.

References

{{Reflist, 2

External links

Agricultural Information Management Standards
E-agriculture Food and Agriculture Organization Standards Information science Knowledge representation Library science