The overall objective of the agricultural metadata framework is to define a low-barrier and richer interoperability layers using emerging standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of agricultural content. The metadata set consists of core elements and qualifiers that are generic to the description of all agricultural information resources.
The specific goals are:
1. To facilitate the discovery of agricultural information resources;
2. To assist the management of resources by the owners;
3. To enable interoperability between different metadata structures through a simple common format;
4. To develop a metadata framework that is compliant with other standards such as MARC, ISBD and new emerging ones like Dublin Core;
5. To encode the metadata framework using new tools such as Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Extensible Markup Language (XML). This in turn will greatly facilitate the exchange of information by:
Providing an overall metadata framework for better search capabilities on the internet
Offering a mechanism for interoperability between applications and
Supplying a potential means for automated processing of web resources
