AGRIS: international system for agricultural information and technology

AGRIS is a global public database providing access to bibliographic information on agricultural science and technology containing over 8 million records, references and links to related data resources on the Web, like DBPedia, World Bank, Nature and FAO country profiles (Food and Agricultural Organization of United Nations).

The initiative CIARD (Open Agricultural Knowledge for Development) maintains this multilingual database whose content is provided by the 150 institutions from 65 countries that form the network, which uses linked open data methodology to provide data covering a wide range of subjects: food, nutrition, agriculture, fisheries, forestry and environment.

AGRIS’ mission is to improve the accessibility of agricultural information available on the Web by:

• Maintaining and enhancing AGRIS, a bibliographic repository for repositories related to agricultural research.
• Promoting the exchange of common standards and methodologies for bibliographic information.
• Enriching the AGRIS knowledge by linking it to other relevant resources on the Web.

AGRIS bibliographic records contain rich metadata and are largely indexed by AGROVOC, FAO’s multilingual agricultural thesaurus; the content includes journal articles, unpublished scientific and technical reports, theses, dissertations and conference papers. When a user makes a search, the system creates a mashup page where all the results of the database are displayed together with other related Web resources. Currently, AGRIS contains more than seven million mash-up pages, all indexed by Google and accessible through a Google search.

AGRIS Application Profile

In order to provide a common format for exchange and description of information resources within the current AGRIS network; the AGRIS AP application profile was created, facilitating interoperability of metadata to enable linking of various types of agricultural information, therefore allowing users to perform cross-searches and other value added services.

Thanks to AGRIS AP a standard data model for bibliographic description of resources in the domain of agriculture is provided so communities around the world have access and re-use such information. Thus, it is also provided a common approach to share information between applications and standards makers, while promoting interoperability between systems.