User:Isiaunia/Agris portal

Access Global Knowledge in Agricultural Research and Technology!
To facilitate the exchange of information and bring together the world’s literature on all aspects of agriculture, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) created the international information system for the agricultural sciences and technology (AGRIS) in 1974.

The AGRIS Portal is a cooperative international information system in which participating countries input references to the literature produced within their boundaries and, in return, draw on the information provided by other participants. More than 250 national, international and intergovernmental centres participate.

The AGRIS Portal is an important FAO Web site with more than 15,000 visits per month and a user community of about 3,000.

The unique AGRIS metadata corpus is a hub to access the diverse knowledge in agricultural science and technology available globally on the web. The ambition is not to collect comprehensively all bibliographic references in the subject area, but to use the latent knowledge in the AGRIS data to find, link and interpret relevant sources on the internet.

The AGRIS Repository
The main component of the AGRIS Portal is the AGRIS Repository, a database of about 2.5 million structured bibliographic metadata records on agricultural science and technology publications collected from 1975 to the present.

In addition to being one of the important bibliographic authorities on published agricultural information, the AGRIS Repository contains a huge percentage of grey literature produced by governments, researchers, international organizations, research stations, consultants and universities.

Furthermore, it contains records from national Journals - especially from developing countries that are not always represented in commercial indexing services.

Localization of knowledge in AGRIS

 * AGROVOC is a comprehensive multilingual agriculture thesaurus that was developed with the cooperation of FAO member countries. It is used for indexing data in agricultural information systems and is continually being improved and updated. The first version of AGROVOC was produced in 1982 and distributed to all AGRIS centres.


 * Vocabulary updating is done by FAO with collaboration from national AGRIS centres. Staff at the centres propose new terms for the database to FAO subject specialists for consideration. The terms selected by the experts are added into AGROVOC. In the past, an AGROVOC supplement was then published and provided to the centres. Now the updated AGROVOC is available online. The proposing of new terms and corrections also can be done through the FAO/AGROVOC web site.


 * Initially AGROVOC was available in English, French and Spanish but has been expanded to four more languages: Arabic, Portuguese, Czech and Chinese. The Thai AGRIS centre has developed the Thai AGROVOC by using the English AGROVOC thesaurus as a prototype.

The AGRIS search engine

 * Access to the AGRIS Repository is provided through the AGRIS Search Engine. As such, the search engine (i) enables retrieval of bibliographic records contained in the AGRIS Repository, (ii) allowing users to perform either full-text or fielded, parametric and assisted queries against the repository.


 * However, the hidden potential within the AGRIS Repository is not fully realized - as yet.

AGRIS: the 2000 Assessment
An assessment of AGRIS in 2000 noted that the network had been partially successful in achieving its goals but limitations were identified in four areas: 1) difficult access to the original documents, 2) incomplete coverage, 3) independent systems and 4) structural and institutional constraints.

To address these limitations, delegates and participants at the first Consultation on Agricultural Information Management (COAIM) in June 2000 discussed the development of a new strategy for the AGRIS network and its participating centres. A paper was presented to COAIM 2002 on what is now known as the new AGRIS strategy, or “new vision for AGRIS”.

AGRIS 2008-2010: New Vision

 * The AGRIS metadata corpus is a one-of-a-kind repository of agricultural knowledge, and the overall goal of the project is to position it as the hub of access to the vast repository of knowledge on agricultural science and technology available globally on the web.


 * Rather than emphasizing the AGRIS Portal as a comprehensive collection of bibliographic references in the subject area, the ambition is to exploit the knowledge implicit in the structured metadata in order to find and link to relevant information sources on the internet.

AGRIS: Strategic Objectives

 * The strategic objectives are determined by the vision above and the goals of the project are:


 * 1. to enable access to the implicit knowledge in the AGRIS database.


 * 2. to use the knowledge in the repository to link and discover resources on the web.


 * The AGRIS Search Engine should be able to retrieve and interpret the diversity of information sources including full-text documents, threads from discussion forums, blog entries, news articles, and organizational, regional, national, international information sources. Partnerships with established search engine technology leaders such as Google, Yahoo or Elsevier (Scirus) will be explored in order to provide such customized search capabilities.


 * 3. to create a state-of-the-art user interface that can be customised according to personal preferences.


 * The latent knowledge in the AGRIS Repository should enable a user interface that admits seamless transitions between searching and browsing and back as the user seeks information relevant to any given task at hand.


 * The key feature of the proposed AGRIS Search Engine is to provide the user with different relevant information types based on their query, including, but not limited to, full-text documents, threads from discussion forums, blog entries, news and events, developmental projects, features, and articles using an advanced and easy-to-use web interface.


 * Users should also have access to local information through regional and national gateways. The portal will further provide a means to personalise user activities, giving the possibility of creating individual spaces based on user preferences. Users will be able to create personal profiles, subscribe to email alerts, mailing lists, discussion forums, and RSS feeds related to their queries and areas of interest.

Publications
The AGRIS Application Profile for the International Information System on Agricultural Sciences and Technology Guidelines on Best Practices for Information Object Description

The AGRIS Centre at Kasetsart University