5.0 Future developments

As mentioned earlier, this paper only represents the first step in the development of tools to aid resource discovery in the agricultural domain. The initiative will be posted and advertised in agricultural forums so as to impact the targeted audience. Work is still in progress and the logical frameworks that have been developed are in the process of being converted into technical frameworks. The proposal will also be presented to the intergovernmental process of FAO for possible endorsement by member countries.

Some of the immediate future developments are as follows:

• To assess the suitable technical framework for describing, storing and processing the metadata. RDF being the foundation for processing metadata, has been considered as a data model to describe, store and process the metadata. The motivation to use RDF for modelling the data lies on the following features of RDF namely:

  1. RDF uses XML which is the future of electronic data processing and information exchange

  2. RDF provides a machine-understandable system for defining schemas for descriptive vocabularies

  3. RDF is a flexible and easily extensible metadata description and data modelling system

  4. RDF is the W3C recommendation

• To initiate a 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;

• To develop software tools in support of the proposed standard (e.g. for import, export, validation, query purposes, etc.);

• To register the metadata framework and specific application profile with authoritative metadata registries.

• To develop guidelines for the application profile to assist implementers and users.

• To monitor the impact of the proposed metadata application profile for agricultural resources, making any changes or enhancements based on the results of the impact study, and undertaking outreach work to promote and facilitate the rational and widespread use of metadata.

• Present the project for further discussions at the DC-2001 Conference in Tokyo, Japan in October 22-26, 2001.

• Project to be discussed in a workshop to be held in November with FAO Partners, Members from different agricultural institutions and collaborative Governments.