Review of Progress and Prospects

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Opportunities for intervention
Actions

4.3 Content management

Participants agreed that a key issue for follow-up was content management, given the need to make information available in digital format, and for technical resources (e.g. standards, tools, applications, languages) to be developed and applied to facilitate digitization of content.

Opportunities for intervention

Participants identified opportunities and constraints at three levels for technical issues related to the management of agricultural science and technology information.

	Opportunities	Constraints
National	Access to national and local content Ability to pool national content resources Adoption of common systems and standards	Lack of use and uniformity of international standards Weak content management processes Access to tools & technologies for managing content
Regional	Ability to facilitate intra-regional: adoption of common standards exchange of information content	Need to accommodate differences in language Lack of applications and tools to manage content Lack of international mechanisms to discuss content management issues
International	Strong ability in tools/applications development Mandate to develop normative standards/tools Ability to deal with language issues Generation of global public goods (content)	Parallel development of standards Lack of capacities/training for implementing new IM techniques Lack of international mechanisms to discuss content management issues

Analysis of the opportunities showed that, at the national level, content resources could be pooled to enhance access to locally-derived content. Such sharing would demand strong standards for information exchange and strong management processes, as well as access to appropriate tools and technologies. At the regional level, the uptake of new methodologies and tools could be facilitated, as well as consideration of policy and operational issues related to intellectual property rights and language differences. There is a lack of systems applications to manage access to content. At the international level, there is comparative advantage in setting standards and in development of specialized tools and applications, especially to address issues such as language. The international organizations with a stake in the process could develop a strong involvement in the Open Access Initiative given their mandate to produce public goods.

Three special issues were highlighted as a result of these discussions, namely: open access publishing, interlinking different information types, and subject vocabularies.

Special issue 1: open access publishing. The open access movement has its roots in the development of electronic print archives for sharing the results of ongoing scholarly research, specifically in the physics and related areas, prior to peer review and journal publication. The Budapest Open Access Initiative (OAI) in 2001 introduced a new business model for academic publishing with the following objectives:

to make research articles in all academic fields freely available;
to make open access publishing economically available;
to promote self-archiving by scientists.

By open access the initiative means: “free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself”. The OAI aims to overcome the limitations of the present model for scholarly publishing, which is expensive for the academic community in richer countries, completely unaffordable for those in developing countries, and too slow in making research articles visible. The core of open access publishing is self-archiving in institutional or other open archives while continuing to publish in traditional peer reviewed journals. Open access journal publishers have other business models charging authors or institutions to process their articles, rather than charging readers to access their publications. Long-term financial sustainability of open access journals in a strictly commercial context is still an issue
On the technical side, the Open Access publishing initiative has created protocols and methodologies to access decentralized open Archives and to harvest metadata, open archive metadata harvesting protocol (OAI-MHP) Open Archive Data providers offer their metadata for harvesting. Open Archive service providers create value-added services for harvested metadata repositories.
The importance of common exchange formats has been evidenced by theses initiatives. In the area of agriculture and related subject areas, the “agStandards” initiative started in 2000 lead to the establishment of a specific metadata registry (name-space) called “AGMES” to complement the more general Dublin Core name-space for sharing metadata on electronic documents. A metadata schema (application profile) for publications and other document-like information objects (DLIOs) has been developed based on Dublin Core and AGMES and it has been proposed as an exchange format for open archive services in agriculture and related subject areas. Presentations were made on all these aspects.
Special issue 2: interlinking different information types. Participants representing a range of communities dealing with other types of information presented the current state of affairs with regard to data standards for statistical data, geospatial data and genetic resources. Technologies are emerging to interlink these different types of information, and the presentation from the genetic resources area pointed out how powerful a cross-application search can become through a common exchange format. It was generally recognized and agreed that interoperability across different information object types and applications is necessary and methodologies have to be developed and applied to facilitate this interoperability. Important lessons have been derived from the experiences different standard-setting communities:

Standards should be kept simple, to facilitate their adoption by data owners.
Mutual trust should be built, for example by acknowledging data ownership.
The benefits should be transparent for each participant in a co-operative effort.
There must be a real ‘business case’ for adoption of standards.

Development of interoperability should be based on strong demand from users for co-operative services.
Special issue 3: subject vocabularies. The future plans of the three main thesauri for agricultural terminology – FAO’s AGROVOC Thesaurus, the NAL Thesaurus, and the CAB Thesaurus – were presented. The thesauri play an important role in the specific workflows of their originating organizations, and therefore there is little likelihood of their merger. It is important that they are made available (possibly as webservices as has been achieved for the NAL thesaurus and AGROVOC) and mapped to each other to form the basis for specific vocabularies and task-oriented ontologies. Examples of applications of ontology-driven information systems were reviewed. A number of important issues in the area of subject vocabularies were identified:

increasing need for multilinguality;
need for taxonomies (derived from subject vocabularies) for structuring Web sites etc;
opportunities to validate vocabularies with users amongst the participating organizations.

Actions

Participants identified four priority areas for ongoing cooperation in relation to content management.

Agricultural Information Management Standards (AIMS) Web site (http://www.fao.org/aims). FAO’s goal for the site is to document and facilitate the harmonization of the various efforts currently taking place in the development of methodologies, standards and applications for agricultural information systems; in order to provide a 'one-stop' access to system designers and implementers. Participants agreed that FAO should continue to develop the site as a reference resource and a forum on standards, tools, and applications to facilitate collaboration, partnership, and networking among partners. The forum function would essentially comprise a selection of discussion lists. Partners agreed to review and use the standards and guidelines made available from the site before embarking on creating new information systems from scratch. It was further agreed that partners would share their standards, tools and vocabularies from the site for reuse by others. There are two levels at which the different information resources can be integrated into the site:

Partial Integration: Integrate by creating a registry with metadata about the different resources and link them back to the originating sources (located on the server of the participating partner).
Full Integration: Integrate not only the metadata about the resources but also maintain a copy of the actual resource on the FAO server.

Project-related information. Participants agreed that FAO should analyse the future of CARIS-related activities, with special regard to the central CARIS database and support to member states, in terms of the development of a portal to facilitate decentralised data management and ownership. Attention should be given to the possibility of closer relationships or even integration with the WISARD system managed by the International Agriculture Centre (IAC) of the Netherlands. Mechanisms would need to be developed to ensure an effective changeover to any new approach that is selected, and eventually guides and management tools would be required together with support and advice for capacity building in countries.
Development of public domain software tools and applications. It was recognized that many national and regional organizations cannot afford commercial software tools and applications for information management and dissemination, and that a continuing role could be foreseen for “freeware” in the context of resources such as the WebAGRIS toolset. Participants agreed that priority should be given to development of tools that allow integration of information about projects, organizations and persons, such as currently being developed in Egypt under the NARIMS project.
Development of “Learning Resource Centres”. These Centres would primarily consist of electronic repositories for storage and exchange of public domain digital learning objects comprising a wide range of types of teaching and learning materials. Examples of such repositories would be the CGIAR Learning Resource Centre and ITrain Online. Strong links would be maintained with regional and sub-regional organizations as per the proposed action contained in section 4.2, and through them with governmental and non-governmental organizations at national level.

Participants also formulated “demonstration projects” in the following three areas to show the benefits of cooperation, building on existing technologies wherever possible. Ad-hoc working groups were formed, and timetables were proposed in order to obtain results by mid-2006.

Common metadata exchange format. Tools will be developed for enhancing access to information in document repositories, including federated searching and/or harvesting technologies where appropriate. This project will improve access to documents and similar information objects in the area of agriculture, fishery, forestry, nutrition and other subjects important for people who are working on combating hunger. The project will establish a common standard for data exchange, and make it possible to use decentralized information by different partners without duplication of work. It will create a common search methodology for partners and increases the effectiveness of document recall and search precision.
Community directory for information on Organizations and for News-feeds/RSS. A plug-in tool will be developed to enable filtering according to content and metadata. The tool should be available for different Web sites to incorporate and show information relevant to their area of interest. The basis for this project will be the use of common application profiles (or standards for sharing information) and the use of RSS for ‘making available’ information to others.
Multilingual ontologies. With a focus on capturing local knowledge, a pilot project will develop a multilingual ontology in the area of terminology related to the mango tree/fruit. The objective of the project will be to represent between 20 to 50 concepts related to mango in the following languages: English, Hindi, Thai, Chinese and Latin American Spanish, including all local terms and possible spelling variants. A tool will then allow the visualization of these concepts and their relationships. The benefits will be the possibility of using local knowledge in the indexing and search functionalities in information systems related to agriculture, the possibility of getting related vocabularies from a broad thesaurus (e.g. AGROVOC) and the possibility of doing cross-language searches. A parallel effect will be the dissemination of the methodology that would be an integral part the AOS Project.

Directory: gil
gil -> 1Compiled by John Dunne-Brady
gil -> Guide to International Legal Citation
gil -> People analytics
gil -> Ww-p summer Reading List Grades 4-5 2014
gil -> Real-Life Dilemmas, Carol Gilligan’s Moral Development Theory
gil -> Year 7 Curriculum Guide
gil -> Year 9 Curriculum Guide
gil -> Gilded Age and Populism Readings (in order of discussion)
gil -> First Steps: Developing and Assessing Student Learning Outcomes for a Credit-Bearing Information Course

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