1. 21-Nov-06Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Requirements for a Knowledge Infrastructure at FAO Case Study: FAO country profiles and mapping information system

2. 21-Nov-06Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Presentation roadmap  FAO as a knowledge organization  Case study: country profiles  Lessons learned and opportunities

3. 21-Nov-06Food 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

4. 21-Nov-06Food 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 www.fao.org/countryprofiles

5. 21-Nov-06Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

6. 21-Nov-06Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Case study

7. 21-Nov-06Food 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

8. 21-Nov-06Food 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.

9. 21-Nov-06Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

10. 21-Nov-06Food 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

11. 21-Nov-06Food 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

12. 21-Nov-06Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Thank you for your attention  For more information: www.fao.org