a dublin core application profile in the agricultural domain johannes keizer, food and agriculture...

A Dublin Core Application Profile in the Agricultural Domain

Johannes Keizer, Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, Library and Documentation Systems Division

Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Conference, Tokyo, October 2001


Irene Onyancha, Johannes Keizer, Stefano Anibaldi

and Stephen Katz,

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Library and Documentation Systems Division



Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Conference, Tokyo, October 2001 Slide 2

The Mandate of FAO

• Goal of FAO is to reduce hunger in the world• WAICENT (World Agricultural Information

Center) is FAO’s approach to fight hunger with information

• FAO itself produces huge amount of content in it’s subject area

• It is also within FAOs mandate to make available useful information from other information providers

• FAO collaborates in information networks




Overview

• Objectives

• Strategy and Methodology

• Results

• Applications




Objectives

• promoting the use of metadata

• creating an exchange format between heterogeneous matadata repositories

– FAO catalogue of webpages– FAO documents and publication catalogue– AGRIS network of documentation centres– ……….

• providing an exchange format that makes possible a layered use. Unqualified Dublin Core as a minimum requirements, but qualifiers to accept also the richer metadata from various systems

• encoding the exchange format in a machine readable language (XML, RDF)




Strategy and Methodology

• Focused on description of document resources but will proceed to define other types of resources such as projects, other multimedia resources such as photos, maps etc.

• Identified a pool of core elements of which we used the DC guidelines to define respective qualifiers

• Made a full description of each element and qualifier using the ISO standards for element description

• Discussed the proposal on various agricultural forums both in-house and external, including at the Agstandards Mailing list. [email protected]




Results: Implementation aspects

• Merged the DC elements Creator, Contributor and Publisher to one main element which we named Creator

• Dropped the element Source and elaborated the element Relation to include information of the source

• Proposed a new core element, Target Audience• Proposed new qualifiers that are not represented

in the generic DC guidelines• Proposed the use of various controlled

vocabularies for elements and qualifiers




Application: A DTD for the Qualified Meta Data Set

• A DTD has been written to test the specifications for their capacity to deliver a common exchange format

• Sample of an output using the application profile on one of the FAO in-house Databases. The AGRIS Archive

<!ELEMENT Resource (Creator+ , Title , Rights* , Language* , Description* , Subject+ , Coverage* , Relation* , Date , Identifier , Type* , Format* , TargetAudience* )><!ATTLIST Resource id CDATA #REQUIRED ><!ELEMENT Creator (CorporateAuthor* , PersonalAuthor* , Publisher* )>

<!ELEMENT Title (MainTitle , AlternativeTitle? , TitleSupplement* )>

<!ELEMENT Rights (Statement* , TermsOfUse* , Patent? )>

<!ELEMENT Description (Abstract* , Notes* , Holdings* , TableOfContents* )>

<!ELEMENT Subject (SubjectClassification* , LocalTerm? , Thesaurus* )>




The AGRIS MHS - an application candidate

ClientClient

AGRIS-ServerAGRIS-Server

DistributedDatabases

DistributedDatabases

Request Search Result

Search ResultsRequests

Information Systems at FAO

AG standards Application ProfileHttp://cfs.zadi.de




Future Developments

• Workshop with FAO Partners and representatives from Member States to discuss the proposed specifications

• Presentation of the proposal on the Conference on Agricultural Information Management (COAIM) for endorsement by FAO members for establishment of a standard

• Implementation of the “AgStandards” proposal as general Exchange format in the AGRIS network

• Multihost search applications within the FAO domain using the “AGStandards” specification

• Pilotproject for cross gateway searching between various Information providers in the subject area (FAO,Novagate, NAL, CG network)




For more Information...........

• - Proceedings of the Conference, page 185

– http://www.fao.org/agris/MagazineArchive/MetaData/Introduction.doc

– Presentation of a metadata set for the description of agricultural documents and document-like resources

• it provides the elements and qualifiers of the proposed standard, presented in a hierarchical structure.

– http://www.fao.org/agris/MagazineArchive/MetaData/PresentationSet.doc

– Element Description for Agricultural Information Resources

• it provides a more detailed description of all the elements and qualifiers, including information on definitions, rules, and data typing.

– http://www.fao.org/agris/MagazineArchive/MetaData/ElementFinal.doc

a dublin core application profile in the agricultural domain johannes keizer, food and agriculture...

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