In this paper we have presented an information bus approach to interoperate different data sources in the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The data sources are both internal and external to the FAO and are used to help developing countries to modernize and expand agriculture, forestry and fisheries by collecting, analyzing and disseminating information which can be used to fight hunger and achieve food security. The different data sources contain information related to different types of documents written in five official languages, statistical data, electronic bibliography references, maps and graphics, and news and events.
The approach is lightweight and based on Web services and XML technologies. It preserves the autonomy of the existing systems and allows evolution by adding and removing data sources. The approach allows the creation of an environment where new web-based information systems can be developed quickly and easily, supports the multilingual characteristics of an institution like FAO, provides dynamic report generation, and handles metadata and language variants in a generic way.
Before development of a full implementation of the prototype throughout the FAO, we are extending the prototype to support XML configuration files, generic report configuration tailored by subject area, ontology services in which based on a data item a list of related data is identified, and public Web services for ontologies, countries, and codes. We are investigating the application of Dublin Core to represent metadata information and, therefore, extending its current use on supporting metadata associated with documents in the XML repository. We also plan to implement the Country Profiles application by using J2EE Web services technology and compare this technology with Microsoft.NET.
