Requirements for a Knowledge Infrastructure at FAO

Case Study: FAO country profiles and mapping information system

21-Nov-06 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Presentation roadmap

FAO as a knowledge organization Case study: country profiles Lessons learned and opportunities

21-Nov-06 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

FAO as a knowledge organization

Article 1 of FAO’s Constitution: “The Organization shall collect, analyse, interpret

and disseminate information relating to nutrition, food and agriculture”

FAO experts knowledge network: agronomists, foresters, fisheries and livestock

specialists, nutritionists, economists, statisticians and other professionals.

FAO Internet knowledge in numbers: 4 million monthly visitors 3 million web pages, 100 000 documents,

hundreds of DBs and information systems

21-Nov-06 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Case study: country profiles

2002: Problem:

national programmes could produce more effective results through a cross-sectoral, country-based approach

a large number of country-based information systems existed, but

information lacked integration: info generated/used in a circumscribed manner.

Approach: The FAO Country Profiles and Mapping Information

System was launched and designed to access all major repositories and IS by country: www.fao.org/countryprofiles

21-Nov-06 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

21-Nov-06 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Case study

21-Nov-06 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Lessons learned

Information Management requirements: Adoption of agreed metadata standards

mapping of country classifications, names in all the 5 languages of the organization

Semantics: ontologies, taxonomies, thesauri and metadata schemas

development of a geopolitical ontology

21-Nov-06 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Case study: country profiles & reports

2003: Internet working prototype of an integration

structure based on Web Services: to allow interoperability of FAO systems and

information sources, and to support dynamic report generation in PDF.

2004: Intranet country briefs application:

A web application for internal and very controlled use that generates country briefs from pieces produced in various departments.

21-Nov-06 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

21-Nov-06 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Lessons learned

Policy requirements: Trust

providers: citation and copyright consumers: quality ranking

Providers ROI increased visibility knowledge base exploited for providers’

own business shared computational and/or storage

resources

21-Nov-06 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Opportunities brought by technology

ICT requirements: Improve access to heterogeneous data

sources Integrate Web 2.0 tools: wikis, blogs,

folksonomies. Secure and controlled environment Resource discovery mechanisms

21-Nov-06 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Thank you for your attention

For more information: www.fao.org