AgMES

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The AgMES (Agricultural Metadata Element set) 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.

Contents

There are numerous other metadata schemas for different types of information resources. The following list contains a list of a few examples:

AgMES as a namespace is designed to include agriculture specific extensions for terms and refinements from established standard metadata namespaces like Dublin Core, AGLS [2] etc. Thus, to be used for Document-like Information Objects, for example like publications, articles, books, web sites, papers, etc., it will have to be used in conjunction with the standard namespaces mentioned before. The AgMES initiative strives to achieve improved interoperability between information resources in agricultural domain by enabling means for exchange of information.

Describing a DLIO with AgMES means exposing its major characteristics and contents in a standard way that can be reused easily in any information system. The more institutions and organizations in the agricultural domain that use AgMES to describe their DLIOs, the easier it will be to interchange data in between information systems like digital libraries and other repositories of agricultural information.

Use of AgMES

Metadata on agricultural Document-like Information Objects (DLIOs) can be created and stored in various formats:

AgMES defines elements that can be used to describe a DLIO that can be used together with other metadata standards such as the Dublin Core, the Australian Government Locator Service. A complete list of all elements, refinements and schemes endorsed by AgMES is available from the AgMES website. [3]

Creating application profiles

Application profiles are defined as schemas which consist of data elements drawn from one or more namespaces, combined by implementers, and optimized for a particular local application. Application profiles share the following four characteristics:

Sample application profiles using AgMES

AgMES and the semantic web

One of the advantages of the AgMES metadata schema is the ability to link between the metadata element and controlled vocabularies. The use of controlled vocabulary provides a "known" set of options to the indexer (and the search programmer) as to how the field can be filled out. Often the values may come from a specific thesaurus (e.g. AGROVOC) or classification schemes (e.g. the AGRIS/CARIS classification scheme) etc. [6]

Thanks to the possibility to use controlled vocabularies for metadata elements, the user is provided with the most precise information. In this context, work is also being carried out on exploiting the power of controlled vocabularies expressed as using URIs and machine-understandable semantics. [7] In this context, FAO is promoting the Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS) initiative with the objective of expressing more semantics within the traditional thesaurus AGROVOC and build a Concept Server [8] as a repository from which it will be always possible to extract traditional KOS.

See also

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References

  1. "Freely Available Standards". Isotc.iso.org. Retrieved 2013-07-10.
  2. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2006-11-14. Retrieved 2006-06-08.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  3. "AgMES 1.1 Namespace Specification | Agricultural Information Management Standards (AIMS)". Aims.fao.org. Retrieved 2013-07-10.
  4. "The AGRIS Application Profile for the International Information System on Agricultural Sciences and Technology". Fao.org. Retrieved 2013-07-10.
  5. "Agricultural Information Management Standards (AIMS) | Interoperability, reusability and cooperation". Fao.org. Archived from the original on 2008-03-06. Retrieved 2013-07-10.
  6. "Agricultural Information Management Standards (AIMS) | Interoperability, reusability and cooperation". Fao.org. Retrieved 2013-07-10.[ permanent dead link ]
  7. Jonquet, Clement; Toulet, Anne; Dutta, Biswanath; Emonet, Vincent (2018-12-01). "Harnessing the Power of Unified Metadata in an Ontology Repository: The Case of AgroPortal". Journal on Data Semantics. 7 (4): 191–221. doi: 10.1007/s13740-018-0091-5 . ISSN   1861-2040. S2CID   256233128.
  8. "Agricultural Information Management Standards (AIMS) | Interoperability, reusability and cooperation". Fao.org. Archived from the original on 2008-10-07. Retrieved 2013-07-10.