Archiving and Putting On-line Agricultural and Natural Resource Data: Special Issues

摘要

Currently , there are serious efforts afoot by many industries and government agencies to archive and electronically mount data for Internet use by clients, researchers and the general public. Agriculture is not unusual in this regard, but it is unusual in the nature of its data, which is often non-discrete, highly complex and spatial-based. To properly serve it on-line, it should be subject to an array of database queries, including object-oriented, and queries from geographic information systems.At the same time, data must be accessible using standardized searching techniques., including those being defined by Project Alexandria and other components of the NSF Digital Libraries Initiative. At the University of Arizona (U/A)there is a collaboration between the caretakersof this data in the academic departments, and university librarians to work on these issues. The results of this collaboration can benefit other institutions and agencies as they deal with the challenge of archiving and mounting their agricultural data sets and can help build an electronic culture for the industry. Example projects include the Santa Rita Experiment Range Project, a 100-year multimedia data set that includes satellite imagery, ground photography, and video as well as text and graphics, and the National Biological Information Infrastructure data sets with National Parks GIS Biological overlays (http://www.ag.arizona.edu). The projects deal with technical issues such as metadata, encoding and encrypting, formats, etc. However, just as important as these are user issues - training, interface, access policies - and information authority issues - who owns the data, what are agreed-upon classification standards, etc. Agriculture needs an institutional approach to these issues. This paper andproject are intended to illustrate this need and what can be done to fulfill it.