Presentation on AGRIS in Department of library and information science. Aligarh Muslim University.

1. ABID FAKHRE ALAM
ZEENAT KHAN
TABASSUM FATIMA
KHUSHBOO KHAN

2. INTRODUCTION
 AGRIS (International System for Agricultural Science and
Technology) is a global public domain database with more
than 8 million structured bibliographical records on
agricultural science and technology.
 The database is maintained by FAO (Food and agriculture
organization) and its content is provided by more than 150
participating institutions from 65 countries.
 It became operational in 1975 and since then AGRIS
has accumulated a database of 8,420,558
million bibliographic references .

3.  It is the world’s leading public information service that
provides open access to a wealth of publications and
information about agriculture.
 It is the world’s only multilingual bibliographic database
for agricultural science.
 It offers more than 8 million links to information produced
by research centres, development programs, international
and national organizations.
 Each month, some of 4,00,000 agricultural and research
professionals worldwide access AGRIS resources
 Through AGRIS references on search engines and Google
Scholar.

4.  AGRIS is unique for its collection of rich bibliographic
records,
 Indexed by Multilingual agricultural
thesaurus AGROVOC and The FAO multilingual
agricultural thesaurus.
 Most AGRIS resources are full text (accessed through
Google)

5. Subject Coverage
 Agriculture
 Forestry
 Animal husbandry
 Aquatic sciences
 Fisheries
 Human nutrition and
 Extension

6. Publication Coverage
 Journal articles
 Monographs
 Book chapters
 grey literature
 science and technical reports
 Theses and dissertations
 conference papers

7. GENESIS
 In the 1970s, the AGRIS metadata corpus was
developed to allow its users to have free access to
knowledge available in agricultural science and
technology.
 AGRIS was developed to be an international
cooperative system to serve both developed and
developing countries.

8.  With the advent of the Internet, along with the
promises offered by open access publishing, there was
growing awareness that the management of
agricultural science and technology information,
would have various facets: standards and
methodologies for interoperability and facilitation of
knowledge exchange; tools to enable information
management specialists to process data; information
and knowledge exchange across countries

9. OBJECTIVES
 Development of Decision Support Systems (DSS) on
Production Practices and Systems. The DSS proposed
under AGRIS will facilitate farmers in adopting
appropriate agricultural production practices
 Creation of Metadata to become the Country’s
initiative of National Spatial Data Infrastructure
(NSDI) on Agriculture

10.  Preparation of Guidelines on standardized
methodology/best practices to be used for building
Agricultural Resource Information System in similar
districts of the Country.

11. AGRIS DATABASE ON-LINE
 On-line access to the global AGRIS database is
provided by:
 AGRIS DATABASE ON-LINE
(FAO/WAICENT, FAO Web server)
 DIALOG (Palo Alto, USA): non-USA portion
only
 DIMDI (Cologne, Germany)
 AGROVOC Thesaurus (FAO/WAICENT, FAO
Web Server)

12. Information Services
 AGRIS provides data on request basis in printed
form or on magnetic media:
 Retrospective searches through the entire
data base
 Selective dissemination of information
(SDI) service, by which users can request
the AGRIS Processing Unit, to keep them
informed of any new AGRIS entries on
specific subjects of concern to them.

13. CONTD…..
 National bibliographies, containing all entries
generated in a country and those concerning this
country and published outside.
 Master copies can be prepared on a high
resolution laser printer in Grinder format, ready
for reproduction by offset or photocopy.
 Subject bibliographies, can also be prepared
upon request from specialized cooperating centers
such as the CGIAR IARC's, or FAO divisions.

14. Other Services
 Developing and distribution of the AGROVOC
Thesaurus
 Distribution of the UNESCO? CDS/ISIS database
software for PCs
 Developing and distribution of software for AGRIS
input data preparation (AGRIN/AGCHK)

15. CONTD…..
 Training material and courses
 Other products on Web Server (APU
Vienna): AGRIS Reference Series

16. AGRIS REPOSITORY
 AGRIS covers the wide range of subjects and Its
content includes unique grey literature such as
unpublished scientific and technical reports, theses,
conference papers, government publications, and
more developed countries.

17. CONTD…
 A growing number (around 20%) of bibliographical
records have a corresponding full text document on
the web which can easily be retrieved by Google.
 Access to the AGRIS Repository is provided
through the AGRIS Search Engine. As such, it:
 enables retrieval of bibliographic records contained
in the AGRIS Repository,
 allows users to perform either full-text or fielded,
parametric and assisted queries.

18. CONTD…
 The AGRIS repository exploits the advantages of
both open source search search platform (Solr),
and structured XML. It facilitates the exchange of
information among developing countries and
between developing and developed countries.

19. CONTD…
 The AGRIS partners contributing to the AGRIS
Database use several formats for exchanging
data, including simple DC, from OAI-
PMH systems.

20. New Developments
 New developments are under work for the AGRIS
System, which will take advantage of the latest
improvements of Information Technologies
(Internet, etc.).
 These developments have in view to decentralize
data processing and to priorities national capacity
building enhancing autonomous management of
national agricultural information.

21. AGRIS -INDIA
The ministry of agriculture , Government of India ,took a
decision in 1974 for participating in AGRIS through a
national input center under the Indian council for
agriculture research (ICAR),New Delhi.
The Agricultural Resources Information System (AGRIS) is
the Central Sector Scheme for Strengthening/Promoting
Agricultural Information System in the Department of
Agriculture & Cooperation (DAC), Ministry of
Agriculture, Government of India.

22. CONT……
 AGRIS is “A Needed Domestic Strategy for
Sustainable Agricultural Production and Sustainable
Rural Livelihoods in India”.
 It is a e-Government Programme for fostering
agricultural growth, poverty reduction and
sustainable resource use in India at grassroots level
and also “A Step towards establishing a location-
specific e-Government model for the Poor”.

23. CONTD……
 The implementation of component AGRIS will
facilitate development of typology specific
agriculture development plan in the country.
 This Project is being executed by Agricultural
Informatics Division of National Informatics
Centre.
 Agricultural Inputs Recommendations
 Farming Systems Analysis and Development
Environmental Impact Assessment
 Monitoring of Land Resources Development

24. Future plans of AGRIS
 Decision Support Systems (DSSs) on Production
Practices and Systems
 Creation of Metadata to become the Country’s
initiative of “National Spatial Data Infrastructure
(NSDI)” on Agriculture.

25. AGRIS is able to extract information from
following resources and enrich the AGRIS data.
 DBPedia (Databasepedia)
 World Bank
 Google Custom Search API
 Nature Open Search
 FAO Geopolitical Ontology – Country profiles
 Global Biodiversity Information Facility
 International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
 FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture fact sheets API
 Diversity International
 Chinese Agricultural Sic-tech Documents Database (CASDD)
 CGRIS germplasm database

26.  DBPedia:
A community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to
make this information available on the web.AGRIS extracts from DBPedia
the definitions of concepts. It also provides you with the possibility to
directly modify the information in Wikipedia.
 World Bank:
An international financial institution that provides loans to developing
countries for capital programs. The World Bank Indicators APIs let you
programmatically access more than 3,000 indicators and query the data in
several ways, using parameters to specify your request. The Indicators give
a lot of details about countries: name, region, coordinates, capital, income
level, lending type, total population, etc.
AGRIS uses the World Bank APIs to retrieve widgets (maps, charts).

27.  Google Custom Search API
It enables you to search a website or a collection of
websites, create a search engine tailored to specific needs
and interests, and present the results in your website.
AGRIS queries Google Custom Search APIs to retrieve
the full texts of the AGRIS records
 Nature Open Search
It provides an open, bibliographic search service for
content hosted on nature.com, comprising around half a
million news and research articles and citations. The API
is accessible both through a Sparql endpoint as a REST
Web service (AGRIS’s choice). AGRIS queries Nature’s
API to retrieve articles and publications.

28.  FAO Geopolitical Ontology – Country profiles
An ontology that contains country statistics, official
country names and codes. AGRIS extracts from this
ontology information about countries
 Global Biodiversity Information Facility
It works to mobilize data and to improve search
mechanisms, data and metadata standards, web
services, and the other components of an Internet-
based information infrastructure for biodiversity .
AGRIS queries the GBIF repository to obtain the KML
of the Distribution Map for Species

29.  International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
An international agricultural research centre that aims to
improve the understanding of national agricultural and
food policies to promote the adoption of innovations in
agricultural technology. AGRIS queries the IFPRI Sparkle
endpoint to retrieve the Global Hunger Indicator and
Children Mortality Rate by country
 FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture fact sheets API
allows you to download statistical graphs about fish
species. AGRIS queries the APIs to obtain the Aquatic
species capture and aquaculture production graphs

30.  Diversity International
contains 3200 unique original field report documents,
recording information about more than 200,000 landrace
and crop wild relative samples collected all over the world
for almost forty years. AGRIS extracts information from
the Crop Collecting Missions.
 Chinese Agricultural Sic-tech Documents Database
(CASDD)
A bibliographic database covering literature from more
than 1,000 titles of Chinese agricultural academic
journals, proceedings, and other materials. A dedicated
Web service was set up only to allow AGRIS to access
this repository, relying on the alignment between
AGROVOC and CAT.

31.  CGRIS germplasm database
a repository for all type of plant genetic resources
information in China. It contains over 4000 MB of data
about 200 kinds of crops. 410,000 germplasm resources
are stored in the CGRIS database. The access to this
database is provided by a Web service that accepts
scientific names or AGROVOC URIs.

32. AGRIS 2.0
 On 5th December 2013 AGRIS 2.0 was released.
 A collaborative network of more than 150 institutions from 65
countries, maintained by FAO of the UN, promoting free access
to agricultural information.
 A multilingual bibliographic database for agricultural science,
fuelled by the AGRIS network, containing more than 8 million
records largely enhanced with AGROVOC, FAO’s multilingual
thesaurus covering all areas of interest to FAO, including food,
nutrition, agriculture, fisheries, forestry, environment etc.

33.  A mash-up web application that links the bibliographic AGRIS
knowledge to related resources on the web using the Linked
Open Data methodology. An AGRIS mash up page
(e.g. http://agris.fao.org/agrissearch/search.do?recordID=QM2
008000025 ) is a web page where an AGRIS resource is
displayed together with relevant knowledge extracted from
external data sources (as the World Bank, DBPedia, and
Nature). The availability of external data sources is not under
AGRIS control. Thus, if an external data source is temporary
unreachable, it won’t be displayed in AGRIS mash up pages.
 AGRIS data was converted to Resources Description
Framework (RDF) and the resulting linked dataset created
some 200 million triples. AGRIS is also registered in the Data
Hub at http://thedatahub.org/dataset/agris

34. THANK YOU
?