Acerca de RING

“a Routemap to Information Nodes and Gateways (RING)
that share information related to agricultural research and innovation for development (ARD)”

The CIARD Routemap to Information Nodes and Gateways (RING) is a project implemented within the Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research for Development (CIARD) initiative and is led by the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR).

The RING is a global registry of web-based services that give access to any kind of information pertaining to agricultural research for development (ARD). It is the principal tool created through the CIARD initiative to allow information providers to register their services in various categories and so facilitate the discovery of sources of agriculture-related information across the world.  The RING aims to provide an infrastructure to improve the accessibility of the outputs of agricultural research and of information relevant to ARD management.
 

Functions of the RING

• to provide a map of accessible information sources with instructions on how they can be searched effectively;
• to provide examples of services that show good practices on implementing “interoperability”;
• to clarify the level and mode of interoperability of information services;
• to provide instructions for building enhanced integrated services that repackage information in different ways.

This makes the RING a real “routemap” that guides the user in discovering, accessing and exploiting the existing information sources.
 

Who uses the RING?
The RING is designed mainly for agricultural information professionals and website developers, and secondarily for consumers of agricultural information as a “bookmark” list of agricultural information services. 

Benefits of using the RING
• it allows information service providers to publicize the services by registering them;
• it provides technical metadata on information services registered by the providers and thus facilitates discovery and use of publicly accessible information to enrich other services.
 

The way forward - CIARD and the RING

The CIARD partners intend that the RING will become the principal global technical platform for accessing, sharing and exchanging information through webservices.

Phase 1: the Registry
The first phase, launched in November 2009, comprises the development of the Registry.  Institutions are encouraged to register and describe their current publicly accessible information sources and services.
The metadata that are so collected:

• allow categorization and interlinking of services according to specific criteria e.g. standards adopted, vocabulary used, technology used, protocols implemented, level of interoperability etc.: these criteria have been developed within the Content Management Task Force (CMTF) of the Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research for Development (CIARD) initiative and are in line with the CIARD Manifesto and Checklist;
• provide detailed instructions on how the featured services can be 'interoperated';
• allow Information professionals and web developers to exploit information in the RING to build advanced services that tap into the registered services.

Phase 2: leveraging the RING Registry to build advanced services
Once the descriptions collected about services are detailed and structured enough, and once the number of registered services is sufficiently large, some advanced services can be built directly on the content of the RING website.  Examples of such services are:

• a global harvester of all registered providers of Open Archives;
• a viewer/navigator for registered RDF stores;
• sample thematic aggregators that harvest from registered RSS feeds;
• sample consumers of web services;
• sample programming code on how to implement services.