IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010

The CIARD RING

an infrastructure for interoperability of agricultural research information services

Valeria Pesce (GFAR), Ajit Maru (GFAR), Johannes Keizer (FAO)

The CIARD RING

IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010

ARD information now

Agriculture-related information on the Internet is limited, widely scattered and not organized for easy access

information cannot be found;

information cannot be re-used, re-packaged and re-purposed

Complex information needs for agricultural research, innovation and development cannot be met.

The CIARD RING

IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010

Availability is just not enough!

HTML HTMLHTML

Users

HTMLHTMLHTML

We need to know if a certain technology has been used in a specific country and in a dryland area for a specific crop and if there are related projects completed or ongoing, who is funding them and where we can find the project outputs?

TECABest practices

Country profiles CARIS WISARD AGRIS

HTML

Country NARS

HTML

ICARDA

HTML

AiDA

HTML

Crop database

HTML

OPACs

Users have to locate and search several sources that provide partial answers to complex questions

The CIARD RING

IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010

Solution: value added services

Value added information services that enable to

search, collate and integrateinformation from various sources

acting as gateways to information sources

The CIARD RING

IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010

Solution: value added services

CARIS / WISARD

Users

We need to know if a certain technology has been used in a specific country and in a dryland area for a specific crop and if there are related projects currently ongoing and where we can find the project outputs?

TECABest practicesCountry

profiles

AGRIS

Country NARS

ICARDA

AiDA

Crop database

Geo

-on

tolo

gy

Crop ontology

Organizations Directory

Agrovocgateway gateway

gateway

Any repository

gatewayAny OPAC

Maize

The CIARD RING

IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010

What is missing

Value added services cannot be built without awareness of what others have done:

• which sources are available

• how to tap into them

• how to exploit their semantics

The CIARD RING

IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010

The CIARD RING service

The CIARD RING is a global registry of information sources and services in agriculturesuch as search engines, databases, repositories, Open Archives, feeds…

The CIARD RING provides the missing routemap to the existing services

The CIARD RING

IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010

Who will use the RING? Information professionals looking for existing

services into which they can tap for feeding their information systems

Information professionals / managers looking for existing services throug which they can disseminate their information.

users interested in an overview of the current offer of information services in ARD

The CIARD RING

IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010

How it works The RING categorizes and interlinks the featured

services according to:

>> content criteria such as thematic coverage geographic coverage content type target audience

>> technical criteria such as

standards adopted vocabularies used technologies used protocols implemented

The CIARD RING

IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010

Services in the RING

The CIARD RING covers both information services and information sources

Technical definition !!

… any form of providing information from one server instance (website, mail server, web services, XML archive...) to many clients (browsers, email clients, news readers, harvesters...)

The CIARD RING

IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010

An infrastructure for interoperability

How does the CIARD RING provide an infrastructure to improve the accessibility of agricultural information?

1) it provides a map of accessible information sources with instructions on how they can be searched effectively;

http://www.agencia.cnptia.embrapa.br/

http://eprints.iari.res.in

http://lad.nafri.org.la

http://ricelib.irri.cgiar.org:81/screens/opacmenu.html

http://www.sidalc.net

The CIARD RING

IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010

An infrastructure for interoperability

How does the CIARD RING provide an infrastructure to improve the accessibility of agricultural information?

2) tit indicates the level and mode of interoperability of information services

The CIARD RING

IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010

An infrastructure for interoperabilityHow does the CIARD RING provide an infrastructure to improve the

accessibility of agricultural information?

3) It provides examples and instructions for building enhanced integrated services that repackage information in different ways.

The CIARD RING

IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010

What can be built out of it Services that offer a common browsing or searching

interface to different sources aggregating and harvesting services; integrated services providing relations between entities

(organizations, projects, experts, documents) through semantic-web technologies;

Value added services that re-package information and make it available through different channels (text messaging, radio etc.);

The CIARD RING

IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010

Be part of the RING The CIARD RING service is available at:

www.ciard.net/ring

Registering a service in the RING automatically makes you a CIARD partner

Partners that register services in the RING are invited to display the RING logo

The CIARD RING

IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010

The CIARD RING

IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010

InvitationWe invite you all to

- make your services known through the CIARD RING

- learn how to tap into other services in the CIARD RING

Thank You