Metadata Application Profile for Agricultural Learning Resources

Abstract

Capacity and institution building is a core function of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO). FAO has recently started the "Capacity and Institution Building Portal" to provide structured access to information on FAO's capacity and institution building services and learning resources. To ensure that the Portal can be searched by users and to enable interoperability with other recognized educational repositories, an Application Profile (AP) was created conforming to available and commonly used standards, to describe agricultural learning resources. This article presents the AP, provides an example of an FAO learning resource described and displayed using FAO Learning Resource AP, and presents the lessons learned.

Evaluation of a Metadata Application Profile for Learning Resources on Organic Agriculture

“…Although there have been several educational metadata APs developed for agricultural applications (Zschocke et al, 2005;Bio@gro, 2005;Cebeci et al, 2008;Stuempel et al, 2007), the process for involving the domain experts in the evaluation of the AP has not be extensively addressed. In this paper we present how the first version of an educational metadata AP is being evaluated through a pilot evaluation trial from the domain experts that were initially involved in its design.…”

Comparing Different Metadata Application Profiles for Agricultural Learning Repositories

“…It aims to support its Capacity and Institution Building Portal, which provides structured access to information on FAO's capacity and institution building services and learning resources [15].…”

“…Adapted version of LOM's [15] Given the above circumstances, the most cost effective solution in the case of FAO resources was to set up an exchange profile with Dublin Core, AgMES and LOM elements. The needs analysis and the evaluation of existing standards resulted in an Agricultural Learning Resource AP (Ag-LR AP) which is created by taking elements from DC, IEEE LOM and AgMES.…”

“…The original description of each element as well as the way it has been used in Ag-LR AP are included. More details about the Ag-LR AP and its elements are available in Stuempel et al [15] and via the Agricultural Information Management Standards (AIMS) Web site 13 . …”

“…The authors would like to thank their colleagues from FAO and the Rural-eGov project that have contributed in the development of Ag-LR AP [15] and ReGov LOM AP [10], respectively.…”