Challenges finding information in food and agriculture on the Web: what can we do better?

Wednesday, 23 September
(2020-09-23)
15:00 - 16:30 UTC

Panelists will be from FAO, CGIAR, Land Portal Foundation, USDA and Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences.

In a massively distributed environment like Internet, service providers play a critical role to make information findable. While data providers make available excellent information, hubs collect their metadata and give visibility worldwide. However, the metadata that is being produced and exposed is not always uniformly rich, and needs to be optimized. In the case of scientific literature in food and agriculture, there are certain singularities that make it even more complex. From one side, grey literature is critical, while journal articles are not necessarily the only scholarly communication channel that counts. Secondly, while in other sciences English is the pivotal language, in the case of the food and agriculture and due to the diversity of languages being used, it is necessary to consider multilingualism and semantic strategies as a way to increase accessibility to scientific literature. Service providers have taken different approaches to resolve all this, through expanding the coverage of types of documents and considering semantic technologies as a key instrument to enrich metadata.

This panel session aims to discuss the challenges that service providers are facing to aggregate content from data providers in food and agricultural sciences. The five panelists will share their experiences from different perspectives: 1. Ag Data Commons which is the public, government, scientific research data catalog and repository available to help the agricultural research community share and discover research data funded by the United States Department of Agriculture and meet Federal open access requirements; 2. AGRIS at Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations with more than 12 Million records about publications in up to 90 different languages from 500 data providers; 3. Beijing agricultural think tank platform which brings together agricultural policy, the development plan, agricultural related reports, agricultural experts data, and statistical data around the world; and 4. GARDIAN, the Global Agricultural Research Data Innovation & Acceleration Network, which is the CGIAR flagship data harvester across all CGIAR Centers and beyond; and 5. The Land Portal Library with 60,000 highly enriched resources related to land governance aggregated from a highly specialized sector.

Speakers