AIMS: Supporting Open Access to Data and Knowledge in the agricultural domainStandards, tools and methodologies

Thembani Malapela

A presentation at the ‘Programme for the OA advocacy workshop for Agricultural Scientists and Professionals’, Hotel Inter Tropics . 14th May 2014

http://aims.fao.org/

Presentation outline• What is AIMS?• How AIMS Supports Openness*?

– i. AIMS (Technical Support in Standards, Tools and Methodologies)

– ii. CIARD ( Advocacy and Policy Support – e.g. Pathways, etc.)

• AIMS recommendations to achieving Openness• What resources are found on AIMS?• Vocabulary, Metadata and Tools

- (Also VEST Directory)

• AIMS Community – (News, Use cases, Webinars@AIMS, Events)

http://aims.fao.org/

What is AIMS?AIMS stands for Agricultural Information Management Standards.–AIMS portal provides advice to information specialists in the agricultural domain in standards, methodologies and tools on the management and dissemination of agricultural information.–AIMS is a resource that provides reference information in standards, methodologies and tools.–AIMS Community of Practice = Community of more than 1,800 persons in the agricultural information management domain.–AIMS also carry out capacity building activities in agricultural domain in standards, tools and methodologies.Facilitated by FAO of the United Nations ; AIMS collaborates with number of partners and supports the CIARD Movement.

http://aims.fao.org/

How AIMS supports Openness?

2 Complimentary efforts:•CIARD (Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research and Development)

–Advocate for Openness–Policy Mandates–CIARD Pathways–Capacity building

•AIMS (Technical Support in Standards, Tools and Methodologies)

http://aims.fao.org/

CIARD

http://aims.fao.org/

AIMS

http://aims.fao.org/

AIMS Recommendations in achieving Openness?

– AIMS supports use of semantic technologies in promoting interoperability of agricultural systems and repositories and subscribes to Linked Open Data principles.

– Therefore:-• Content should be stable, discoverable by humans &

machines.• Use structured and established metadata standards• Use controlled vocabularies, authority data & syntax

encoding.• Use resource URIs as data values when available

http://aims.fao.org/

AIMS Recommendations …cntd (1)

i.Metadata• LODE-BD Recommendations 2.0 aims to support

the selection of appropriate encoding strategies for producing meaningful Linked Open Data (LOD)-enabled bibliographical data.

• The LODE-BD recommendations are applicable for structured data describing bibliographic resources such as articles, monographs, theses, conference papers, presentation materials, research reports, learning objects, etc. – in print or electronic format

http://aims.fao.org/

AIMS Recommendations …cntd (2)

ii.Linking content by using widely-used controlled vocabularies–AGROVOC[2] is a subject vocabulary covering areas that include food, nutrition, agriculture, fisheries, forestry and environment. To date, AGROVOC contains over 32,000 concepts organized in a hierarchy, where each concept may have labels in up to 22 languages. –AGROVOC is available as a Linked Open Data, aligned with more than 10 vocabularies. The Linked Data version of AGROVOC is in RDF/SKOS-XL.

http://aims.fao.org/

AIMS Recommendations …cntd (3)

iii.Register your information services with CIARD RING–Once a repository implements proper metadata encoding and applies widely used controlled vocabularies, registering repositories with CIARD RING facilitates further discovery of the repositories by aggregators.

http://aims.fao.org/

CIARD RING

http://aims.fao.org/

AIMS Recommendations – use cases

– AIMS team has customized Information Management Tools

– Content Management System - Drupal ™ published as AgriDrupal

– Document Management System – DSpace™ customized as AgriOcean DSpace

http://aims.fao.org/

AgriOcean DSpace

http://aims.fao.org/

http://aims.fao.org/

AgriDrupal @RUFORUM

http://aims.fao.org/

What resources are found in AIMS?

- 4 weeks

http://aims.fao.org/

Webinar@AIMS

• Specialized FREE webinars on a specific IM or AIMS topic

• 30 min presentation with time for questions• Delivered to AIMS Community• Recent topics• AGRIS 2.0/ COAR/Islandora/• Upcoming ….KOHA 22.05.2014

AGORA 29.05.2014

http://aims.fao.org/

Join the AIMS Community

http://aims.fao.org/

Thank You! Asante Sana! aims@fao.org

thembani.malapela@fao.org