AGRIS

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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 database was maintained by Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research for Development, and its content is provided by more than 150 participating institutions from 65 countries. The AGRIS Search system, [1] allows scientists, researchers and students to perform sophisticated searches using keywords from the AGROVOC thesaurus, specific journal titles or names of countries, institutions, and authors. [2]

Contents

Early AGRIS years

FAO Commemorative 1984 Ten Years of AGRIS Bronze Obverse FAO Commemorative 1984 Ten Years of AGRIS Bronze Obverse.jpg
FAO Commemorative 1984 Ten Years of AGRIS Bronze Obverse

As information management flourished in the 1970s, the AGRIS metadata corpus was developed to allow its users to have free access to knowledge available in agricultural science and technology. AGRIS was developed to be an international cooperative system to serve both developed and developing countries.


With the advent of the Internet, along with the promises offered by open access publishing, there was growing awareness that the management of agricultural science and technology information, would have various facets: standards and methodologies for interoperability and facilitation of knowledge exchange; tools to enable information management specialists to process data; information and knowledge exchange across countries. Common interoperability criteria were thus adopted in its implementation, and the AGRIS AP metadata was accordingly created in order to allow exchange and retrieval of Agricultural information Resources. [3]

AGRIS 2.0

FAO Commemorative 1994 Twenty Years of AGRIS Bronze Obverse FAO Commemorative 1994 Twenty Years of AGRIS Bronze Obverse.jpg
FAO Commemorative 1994 Twenty Years of AGRIS Bronze Obverse

AGRIS covers the wide range of subjects related to agriculture science and technology, including forestry, animal husbandry, aquatic sciences and fisheries, human nutrition, and extension. Its content includes unique grey literature such as unpublished scientific and technical reports, theses, conference papers, government publications, and more. A growing number (around 20%) of bibliographical records have a corresponding full text document on the web which can easily be retrieved by Google.

On 5 December 2013 AGRIS 2.0 was released. AGRIS 2.0 is at the same time:

  1. A collaborative network of more than 150 institutions from 65 countries, maintained by FAO of the UN, promoting free access to agricultural information.
  2. A multilingual bibliographic database for agricultural science, fuelled by the AGRIS network, containing more than 8 million records largely enhanced with AGROVOC, FAO’s multilingual thesaurus covering all areas of interest to FAO, including food, nutrition, agriculture, fisheries, forestry, environment etc.
  3. A mash-up web application that links the bibliographic AGRIS knowledge to related resources on the web using the Linked Open Data methodology. An AGRIS mashup page (e.g. http://agris.fao.org/agris-search/search.do?recordID=QM2008000025 ) is a web page where an AGRIS resource is displayed together with relevant knowledge extracted from external data sources (as the World Bank, DBPedia, and Nature). The availability of external data sources is not under AGRIS control. Thus, if an external data source is temporary unreachable, it won’t be displayed in AGRIS mashup pages.

Access to the AGRIS Repository is provided through the AGRIS Search Engine. [4] As such, it:

  1. enables retrieval of bibliographic records contained in the AGRIS Repository,
  2. allows users to perform either full-text or fielded, parametric and assisted queries.

AGRIS data was converted to RDF and the resulting linked dataset created some 200 million triples. AGRIS is also registered in the Data Hub at http://thedatahub.org/dataset/agris%5B%5D

The AGRIS partners contributing to the AGRIS Database use several formats for exchanging data, including simple DC, from OAI-PMH systems. The AGRIS AP format is anyway adopted directly by:

  1. Open Archive Initiative (OAI) partners: Scielo, Viikki Science Library
  2. BIBSYS, Norway, National Library of Portugal, Wageningen UR Library.
  3. National networks: NARIMS [5] in Egypt, PhilAgriNet in Philippines, KAINet in Kenya, NAC in Thailand, GAINS in Ghana.
  4. National institutional repositories: Russia, Belarus, Uruguay, Spain, Iran.
  5. Information service providers: Wolters Kluwer, NISC, CGIR, CGIAR, AgNIC, GFIS.
  6. Database systems/tools: AgriOceanDspace, [6] NewGenlib, WebAGRIS, NERAKIN, AgriDrupal. [7]

AGRIS under the CIARD umbrella

Falling under the umbrella of CIARD, [8] a joint initiative co-led by the CGIAR, [9] GFAR [10] and FAO, the new AGRIS aims to promote the sharing and management of agricultural science and technology information through the use of common standards and methodologies. These will incorporate Web 2.0 features, in order to make the search experience as comprehensive, intuitive and far-reaching as possible for users of the new AGRIS.

Furthermore, the new AGRIS will also leverage the data and infrastructure of one of CIARD's projects: the CIARD RING. An acronym standing for Routemap to Information Nodes and Gateways (RING), the CIARD RING project is led by GFAR and it aims to:

A directory of ARD (Agricultural Research for Development) information services will allow the monitoring, describing and classifying of existing services, whilst benchmarking them against interoperability criteria, to ensure for maximum outreach and global availability.

See also

Related Research Articles

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CGIAR Food security organisation

CGIAR is a global partnership that unites international organizations engaged in research about food security. CGIAR research aims to reduce rural poverty, increase food security, improve human health and nutrition, and sustainable management of natural resources. It is carried out at 15 centers that collaborate with partners from national and regional research institutes, civil society organizations, academia, development organizations, and the private sector. These research centers are around the globe, with most in the Global South and Vavilov Centers of agricultural crop genetic diversity.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to library science:

Fedora Commons

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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, the vocabulary consisted of over 39,600 concepts with up to 924,000 terms in up to 41 different languages. It is a collaborative effort, edited by a community of experts and coordinated by FAO. AGROVOC is made available by FAO as an RDF/SKOS-XL concept scheme and published as a linked data set aligned to 20 other vocabularies.

The AgMES initiative was developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations and aims to encompass issues of semantic standards in the domain of agriculture with respect to description, resource discovery, interoperability and data exchange for different types of information resources.

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:

A current research information system (CRIS) is a database or other information system to store, manage and exchange contextual metadata for the research activity funded by a research funder or conducted at a research-performing organisation.

SIMILE was a joint research project run by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries and MIT CSAIL and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project ran from 2003 to August 2008. It focused on developing tools to increase the interoperability of disparate digital collections. Much of SIMILE's technical focus is oriented towards Semantic Web technology and standards such as Resource Description Framework (RDF).

The Global Forum on Agricultural Research and Innovation (GFAR) is an inclusive global mechanism enabling all those concerned with the future of agriculture and its role in development around the world to come together and address key global needs. GFAR provides an open forum for stakeholders across the agricultural spectrum—from researchers and organizations to farmers—to participate in collaborative discussion and action around the current and future state of agriculture.

Amit Sheth is a computer scientist at University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina. He is the founding Director of the Artificial Intelligence Institute, and a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. From 2007 to June 2019, he was the Lexis Nexis Ohio Eminent Scholar, director of the Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing, and a Professor of Computer Science at Wright State University. Sheth's work has been cited by over 48,800 publications. He has an h-index of 106, which puts him among the top 100 computer scientists with the highest h-index. Prior to founding the Kno.e.sis Center, he served as the director of the Large Scale Distributed Information Systems Lab at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia.

Metadata Data about data

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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 similar areas.

The FAO Country Profiles are a multilingual web portal which repackages the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) vast archive of information on its global activities in agriculture and food security in a single area and catalogues it exclusively by country and thematic areas.

VOA3R

The Virtual Open Access Agriculture & Aquaculture Repository Project (VOA3R) was a European research project financed through the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Union. The project consortium was composed of fourteen partners from ten different countries, as well as representatives from FAO of the United Nations.

Asset Description Metadata Schema

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YPARD


Young Professionals for Agricultural Development (YPARD) is an international movement for young professionals. YPARD operates as a network in 72 countries through its chapters this multi-stakeholder platform's main mission is to serve as a collective global network that enables young professionals to realize their full potential and contribute proactively towards innovative and sustainable agricultural development.

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In linguistics and language technology, a language resource is a "[composition] of linguistic material used in the construction, improvement and/or evaluation of language processing applications, (...) in language and language-mediated research studies and applications."

References

  1. ↑ "agris.fao.org". agris.fao.org. Retrieved 14 March 2016.
  2. ↑ Bartol, Tomaz (2009). "Assessment of classification and indexing of an agricultural journal based on metadata in AGRIS and CAB Abstracts databases". International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies. 4 (1/2): 4. doi:10.1504/ijmso.2009.026249. ISSN   1744-2621.
  3. ↑ "The AGRIS Application Profile for the International Information System on Agricultural Sciences and Technology Guidelines on Best Practices for Information Object Description". Fao.org. Retrieved 9 July 2013.
  4. ↑ "agris.fao.org". agris.fao.org. Retrieved 9 July 2013.
  5. ↑ arc.sci.eg
  6. ↑ "AgriOcean DSpace | Agricultural Information Management Standards (AIMS)". Aims.fao.org. Retrieved 9 July 2013.
  7. ↑ "AgriDrupal | Agricultural Information Management Standards (AIMS)". Aims.fao.org. Retrieved 9 July 2013.
  8. ↑ "What is CIARD? | Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research for Development". Ciard.net. Archived from the original on 25 July 2013. Retrieved 9 July 2013.
  9. ↑ Rijsberman, Frank (4 July 2013). "CGIAR Home". Cgiar.org. Retrieved 9 July 2013.
  10. ↑ "EGFAR web Site". Egfar.org. Retrieved 9 July 2013.

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