Metadata the basis of Interconnectivity
The use of metadata has become very popular in website building as it supports search engines like Google and Yahoo to quickly find and rank your website. Nowadays, such so-called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become an industry in itself and the vast majority of websites worldwide have meta-descriptions on board.
Most popular metadata schema as developed and promoted by Google and Yahoo are schema.org and FOAF (Friend of a Friend). Schema.org is a collaborative, community activity with a mission to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the Internet, on web pages, in email messages, and beyond. FOAF describes persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects.
Practical farming meta-data schema
Many domain specific metadata schema already exist in agriculture. The majority serve data exchange for academic and research purposes or have a focus on a particular subdomain (ISO 28258 SoilML). Remarkably enough, no globally accepted, multilingual and practical data schema in agriculture production, processing and trade exists.
The only known schema according to own research and a comprehensive FAO (2021) study is the AgroRDF which at its present stage has a very limited use for tropical agriculture as "Probably the most important weakness is the largely German focus, so although many concepts are labeled in English there are also many which are not. No account is taken of other languages, and a great deal more alignment and reuse/reference of other ontologies would be an improvement and increase its utility."
AgroEco-RDF schema development
We Propose to follow the schema.org example and develop a collaborative community driven metadata schema for practical farming, nature & conservation, processing and trade activities.
