A Distributed Architecture for Harvesting Metadata Describing Organizations in the Agriculture Sector

Providing easy access to updated, accurate and semantically meaningful information about organizations working in the agriculture sector is of primary importance in agricultural information management. Many databases of these organizations already exist but none are comprehensive and all differ in coverage (often overlapping), semantic organization, being up-to-date, quantity and quality of the information they provide. In addition, only very few information systems share and exchange data among themselves. This paper describes a distributed architecture which minimizes duplication in information storage and flow and improves quality of the information provided. In this architecture the data describing an organization are stored in a file as an XML description based on a specific metadata set, and access to these distributed files is facilitated by a central registry file. The proposed metadata set is also discussed, with special focus on those aspects that help to make the architecture coherent.