Presentation by Veleria Pesce (GFAR) at the IAALD 2010 World Congress - 26-29 April 2010, Montpellier, France

1. IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010
The CIARD RING
an infrastructure for
interoperability of agricultural
research information services
Valeria Pesce (GFAR), Ajit Maru (GFAR), Johannes Keizer (FAO)

2. IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010
The CIARD RING
ARD information now
Agriculture-related information on the Internet is limited,
widely scattered and not organized for easy access
 information cannot be found;
 information cannot be re-used, re-packaged and
re-purposed
 Complex information needs for agricultural
research, innovation and development cannot
be met.

3. IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010
The CIARD RING
Availability is just not enough!
Users have to locate and search several sources that
provide partial answers to complex questions
Best Country Country Crop
TECA practices profiles NARS database ICARDA CARIS WISARD AiDA AGRIS OPACs
HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML
HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML
We need to know if a certain technology has been used in a specific
country and in a dryland area for a specific crop and if there are related
projects completed or ongoing, who is funding them and where we can
find the project outputs?
Users

4. IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010
The CIARD RING
Solution: value added services
Value added information services
that enable to
search, collate and integrate
information from various sources
acting as gateways to information sources

5. IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010
The CIARD RING
Solution: value added services
Maize
Best CARIS /
TECA practices WISARD AiDA Organizations
Geo-ontology
Country Directory
profiles
Country gateway gateway Agrovoc
NARS Any
Crop ontology repository
Crop
database ICARDA gateway
gateway AGRIS
Any OPAC
We need to know if a certain technology has been used in a specific
country and in a dryland area for a specific crop and if there are
Users
related projects currently ongoing and where we can find the project
outputs?

6. IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010
The CIARD RING
What is missing
Value added services cannot be built
without awareness of what others have
done:
• which sources are available
• how to tap into them
• how to exploit their semantics

7. IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010
The CIARD RING
The CIARD RING service
 The CIARD RING is a global registry of
information sources and services in
agriculture
such as search engines, databases, repositories,
Open Archives, feeds…
The CIARD RING provides the missing
routemap to the existing services

8. IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010
The CIARD RING
Who will use the RING?
 Information professionals looking for existing
services into which they can tap for feeding their
information systems
 Information professionals / managers looking
for existing services throug which they can
disseminate their information.
 users interested in an overview of the current
offer of information services in ARD

9. IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010
The CIARD RING
How it works
 The RING categorizes and interlinks the featured
services according to:
>> content criteria such as >> technical criteria such as
thematic coverage standards adopted
geographic coverage vocabularies used
content type technologies used
target audience protocols implemented

10. IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010
The CIARD RING
Services in the RING
The CIARD RING covers both information
services and information sources
Technical definition !!
… any form of providing information from one
server instance (website, mail server, web
services, XML archive...) to many clients
(browsers, email clients, news readers,
harvesters...)

11. IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010
The CIARD RING
An infrastructure for interoperability
How does the CIARD RING provide an infrastructure to improve the
accessibility of agricultural information?
1) it provides a map of accessible information sources with
instructions on how they can be searched effectively;
http://www.agencia.cnptia.embrapa.br/
http://eprints.iari.res.in
http://lad.nafri.org.la
http://www.sidalc.net
http://ricelib.irri.cgiar.org:81/screens/opacmenu.html

12. IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010
The CIARD RING
An infrastructure for interoperability
How does the CIARD RING provide an infrastructure to improve the
accessibility of agricultural information?
2) tit indicates the level and mode of interoperability of
information services

13. IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010
The CIARD RING
An infrastructure for interoperability
How does the CIARD RING provide an infrastructure to improve the
accessibility of agricultural information?
3) It provides examples and instructions for building enhanced
integrated services that repackage information in different
ways.

14. IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010
The CIARD RING
What can be built out of it
 Services that offer a common browsing or searching
interface to different sources
 aggregating and harvesting services;
 integrated services providing relations between entities
(organizations, projects, experts, documents) through
semantic-web technologies;
 Value added services that re-package information and
make it available through different channels (text
messaging, radio etc.);

15. IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010
The CIARD RING
Be part of the RING
 The CIARD RING service is available at:
www.ciard.net/ring
 Registering a service in the RING automatically makes
you a CIARD partner
 Partners that register services in the RING are invited to
display the RING logo

16. IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010
The CIARD RING

17. IAALD 13th Congress, Montpellier, France, 26-29 April 2010
The CIARD RING
Invitation
We invite you all to
- make your services known through the CIARD RING
- learn how to tap into other services in the CIARD RING
Thank You