Reorienting open repositories to the challenges of the semantic web: Experiences from FAO's contribution to the resource processing and discovery cycle in repositories in the agricultural domain

Abstract

The use of widely-used metadata standards is essential to guarantee the visibility and retrieval of documents stored in open repositories. Attention should be paid to the creation and exchange of meaningful metadata to enhance interoperability amongst repositories and provide value added services. Since 2005 the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) provides the agricultural information management community with standards, services and tools to assist open repositories in benefiting from the advantages offered by Semantic Web publishing. This paper presents the work that FAO carries out in recommending standards for the encoding and exchange of metadata while also reviewing techniques to help navigate within open repositories and services. It talks about how to improve the visibility of repository content and explains the benefits of integrating subject vocabulary tools expressed in SKOS.It concludes with a presentation of use cases integrating these recommendations into DSpace and Drupal customizations. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.