Agricultural Information Management Standards (AIMS) is a web site managed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) for accessing and discussing agricultural information management standards, tools and methodologies connecting information workers worldwide to build a global community of practice. Information management standards, tools and good practices can be found on AIMS:
to support the implementation of structured and linked information and knowledge to enable institutions and individuals from different technical backgrounds to build open and interoperable information systems; to provide advice on how to best manage, disseminate, share and exchange agricultural scientific information; to promote good practices widely applicable and easy to implement, and; to foster communities of practices centered on interoperability, reusability and cooperation.
Users
AIMS is primarily intended for information workers—librarians, information managers, software developers—but is also of interest to those who are simply passionate about knowledge and information sharing. The success of AIMS depends upon its communities reaching a critical mass to show that the investment in interoperability standards has a return.
Community
AIMS holds 9 communities of practice. They are intended to discuss and share information about the different ongoing initiatives under the AIMS umbrella. AIMS supports collaboration through forums and blogs amongst institutions and individuals that wish to share expertise on how to use tools, standards and methodologies. Moreover, news and events are published on AIMS as part of its ‘one-stop” access to interoperability and reusability of information resources. The AIMS communities are aimed at the global agricultural community, including information providers, from research institutes, academic institutions, educational and extension institutions and also the private sector.
Content
Vocabularies
AGROVOC is a comprehensive multilingual vocabulary that contains close to 40,000 concepts in over 20 languages covering subject fields in agriculture, forestry and fisheries together with cross-cutting themes such as land use, rural livelihoods and food security. It standardizes data description to enable a set of core integration goals: interoperability, reusability and cooperation. In this spirit of collaboration, AGROVOC also works with other organizations that are using Linked Open Data techniques to connect vocabularies and build the backbone of the next generation of internet data; data that is marked up not just for style but for meaning. It is maintained by a global community of librarians, terminologists, information managers and software developers using VocBench, a multilingual, web-based vocabulary editor and workflow management tool that allows for simultaneous, distributed editing. In addition to AGROVOC, AIMS provides access to other vocabularies like the Geopolitical ontology and Fisheries Ontologies. The Geopolitical ontology is used to facilitate data exchange and sharing in a standardized manner among systems managing information about countries and/or regions. The network of fisheries ontologies was created as a part of the NeOn Project and it covers the following areas: Water areas: for statistical reporting, jurisdictional (EEZ), environmental (LME), Species: taxonomic classification, ISSCAAP commercial classification, Aquatic resources, Land areas, Fisheries commodities, Vessel types and size, Gear types, AGROVOC, ASFA. AgMES is as a namespace designed to include agriculture specific extensions for terms and refinements from established standard metadata namespaces like Dublin Core or AGLS, used for Document-like Information Objects, for example like publications, articles, books, web sites, papers, etc. Linked Open Data (LOD) - Enabled Bibliographic Data (LODE-BD) Recommendations 2.0 are a reference tool that assists bibliographic data providers in selecting appropriate encoding strategies according to their needs in order to facilitate metadata exchange by, for example, constructing crosswalks between their local data formats and widely used formats or even with a Linked Data representation