The exponential and uncontrolled growth of resources on the World Wide Web (WWW) has brought with it the daunting task of their management. The information needs of users are often complex, implying that information - and eventually knowledge - be drawn from distributed archives and systems and presented to the user in a cohesive and comprehensive manner. The "semantic web" initiative defines this goal, and various projects are under way to improve resource discovery.[3]
Experts in information management and related areas have been working progressively on new strategies to solve the problem arising from information overflow. Our efforts in FAO take into account their successful methodologies and aim to apply them to improve access to information in the domain of agriculture.
There is a great need to create robust mechanisms to exchange and share information stored in departmental, regional, national and international databases. The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) has been gaining widespread acceptance as a platform-independent format for data exchange; eliminating the barriers set up by sometimes authoritarian and proprietary formats.[4] XML uses tags as containers of content or information. Our efforts in the metadata area try to define these human- and machine-understandable tags or containers.
