On behalf of the "Agricultural Metadata Standards Initiative", a
collaborative
effort between a number of partners in the agricultural community, I am
pleased
to announce a specification for a metadata standard based on the Dublin Core
Elements and Qualifiers, as well as extensions which were considered
necessary
for Agricultural Information. The final draft of this specification has now
published on the FAO web-site at
http://www.fao.org/agris/MagazineArchive/magazine/TaskForceonDCMI.htm.
The Agricultural Metadata Standards Initiative was launched in November of
2000
at a workshop in Brussels jointly organized by the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations (FAO - http://www.fao.org) and OneWorld
Europe (http://www.oneworld.org).
The next step for the Agricultural Metadata Standards Initiative will be to
encode and publish the Application Profile both as an XML Document Type
Definition as well as an RDF Schema. The schema will be put to immediate use
as part of pilot project between FAO and a number of important and successful
agricultural gateway services. The project aims to provide a single access
point with multi-host searching using the Agricultural Application Profile as
the standard for linking common metadata across the different gateway
services.
More background information on the "Agricultural Metadata Standards
Initiative"
can be found at http://www.oneworld.net/thinktank/iktools/agstandards.html.
Regards,
Stephen Katz
Chief, WAICENT/FAOINFO Dissemination Management Branch
Library and Documentation Systems Division
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations - Rome
http://www.fao.org/waicent/default.htm
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