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Developing Agricultural Research Information Systems: The experience of the Global Forum on Agricultural Research

Published by the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, St. Joseph, Michigan www.asabe.org

Citation:  7th World Congress on Computers in Agriculture Conference Proceedings, 22-24 June 2009, Reno, Nevada (electronic only)  711P0409e.(doi:10.13031/2013.29070)
Authors:   Ajit P Maru, Mark Holderness, Valeria Pesce
Keywords:   information systems, information management, information sharing, agricultural management, agricultural research for development, agriculture, information

The Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR) is a platform at the global level for dialogue and action of all stakeholders of agricultural research and innovation for development (ARD). Improving sharing and exchange of information that contributes to agricultural research for development is one of the primary actions of GFAR. This paper will describe GFARs experiences in fostering and supporting the development agricultural research information systems at national, regional and global levels, illustrating the evolution of the overall approach, the initiatives of the various stakeholders and the experiences with different technologies. A description of the evolution of the approach in building agricultural information systems and an overview of the major services implemented over the last decades and their technological features will demonstrate that creating integrated information services giving access and adding value to information that is electronically available, especially through semantics, remains a major challenge. In order for this to be achieved, the existing sources of information must become really interoperable and allow for easy automatic retrieval of information, and work on mapping between vocabularies or advanced natural language processing must be done for improving the semantic accessibility of information.

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