| dc.description.abstract | The need for integrated information systems in the agricultural domain is widely acknowledged. Relevant information on a specific topic, with a specific geographic scope, or aimed at a specific audience is rarely available from one single source. Many sources of information exist but none are comprehensive and all differ in coverage (often overlapping), semantic organization, being up-to-date, quantity and quality of the information they provide: on the part of the user who looks for information, selecting only one source is limiting and no cross-searches are possible because very few information systems share and exchange data among themselves. In order for integrated information systems to provide information that is really relevant, comprehensive and tailored to specific audiences, information has to be gathered from as many relevant sources as possible and re-purposed for the specific needs of the prospected audiences. The real value addition of integrated information systems is the selection of quality sources and the re-purposing of contents for specific audiences and needs. The main difficulty in building such integrated information systems is the little awareness of what information sources exist, how interoperable they are, how to tap into them and how to exploit their semantics. There is no comprehensive list or directory of agricultural information sources and technical details about these sources are often not documented and known only to the developers. This is why the Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research for Development (CIARD) initiative launched in November 2009 a new service called the Routemap to Information Nodes and Gateways (RING), aiming at providing a map of existing information sources in agriculture. The RING (http://ring.ciard.net) is managed by one of the founding members of the CIARD initiative: the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR). The RING is a platform where detailed information about information sources and services is collected through a submission form and made searchable through a search engine. The way the services are catalogued and categorized enhances the potential re-usability of the information they offer: the services are described in details and categorized according to criteria that are relevant to the use of the service and its interoperability. These criteria include content criteria such as thematic coverage, geographic coverage, content type, target audience; and technical criteria such as metadata sets adopted, vocabularies used, technologies used, protocols implemented. Particular importance, especially in the context of CIARD, is given to the use of standards in the management of information: in order to build integrated information systems, sources should provide some level of technical and semantic interoperability, which can only be achieved through the use of standards. In order to provide comprehensive “authority” lists of existing information management standards, the RING harvests information from the registries available in the Agricultural Information Management Standards (AIMS) website: the registry of metadata sets and the registry of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS). As regards other technical standards that are relevant to interoperability (protocol, notation), no comprehensive authority lists have been found, so the system provides free-tagging lists that users can extend. Beside disseminating technical information on existing services, the RING will provide tutorials and examples of good practices on how to implement interoperability and to efficiently re-use and re-purpose information from interoperable sources. The CIARD partners intend that the RING will become the principal global technical platform for enhancing the interoperability of information services and supporting the building of new integrated information systems. | id |
