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WP2
: Inventory of legislation and
geotraceability data management
3) Metadatabase prototype of information available
in the test sites
This deliverable aims at making an inventory of data
used in the two test regions for administrative or traceability
purposes including contextual geographical data . The
main conclusions of this analysis emphasize the fact
that there exists a large quantity of data available
at the very first production stages in agriculture. These
data are collected by a large variety of entities and
are often encoded under numerous formats or their uses
are restricted. Moreover, all the data are not necessarily
available to anyone for any kind of purposes. Some data
can be obtained under the respect of strict usability
conditions and some others are only reserved to the Administration.
It is interesting to notice that
geographical data are more and more considered as “normal” data.
Each test region has a complete set of geographical information
layers covering a lot of topics. It is also interesting
to notice that the collected data at the farm level often
contain references to geographical objects such as parcel
for example. Unfortunately, the data collected by the
different bodies are rarely exchangeable. The problem
mainly lies in the existing format or the structure differences
of the data files. At the light of this analysis, it
clearly appears that the European Community needs an
Open Source Standard applied to the transfer of the agricultural
traceability data.
Often, the collecting bodies have totally different
objectives and sometimes totally different commercial
reasons to collect the information. The collected data
are often the same on each form. This fact creates redundancy
and raises the cost of data collection. A solution can
be provided with the installation of a metadata portal
devoted to agriculture which could enable to summarize
all the existing type of information and to provide links
to the specified sources.
The inventory constitutes the basis for setting up
the common catalogue of geotraceability and agro-environmental
data (METACAP) for both test sites in order to provide
all the potential actors of the sector with a consolidated
picture of available data. This catalogue should allow
each actor to test the possibility of playing, with respect
to others, the role of information supplier.
This deliverable proposes a MetaCAP catalogue structure
prototype for extending metadata so as to fit specialized
needs in relation to geotraceability, farm and environmental
management. This catalogue prototype may help in the
development of a generic catalogue.
The MetaCAP catalogue has been designed to be compatible
with the Dublin Core recommendations. However, it appears
that the specificity of GTIS-CAP data has led the project
to consider a richer metadata schema by combining DC
metadata elements with specific additional elements grouped
in the GTIS schema.
In the MetaCAP catalogue, an object is described by
a set of metadata composed of three groups of elements:
the root elements, the Dublin Core elements set (DC profile)
and the GTIS elements set (GTIS profile). Metadata entities,
metadata elements as well as mandatory or conditional
elements have been defined in order to serve all the
metadata applications (data discovery, cross-analysis,
data analysis, etc.).
The ability to search and to find information as well
as resource management are enhanced by controlled vocabularies
linked to the metadata elements. For these reasons, multilingual
lists of standardised terminology are used for the indexing
and the retrieval of information is drawn up. These lists
of controlled vocabulary are implemented into 19 MetaCAP
tables.
Metadata can be expressed in different ways as HTML,
XHTML or XML. Considering that Web is a powerful tool
for managing GTIS information issues, a MetaCAP search
engine has been implemented on an Extranet MetaCAP portal.
By this way, it is possible to exploit GTIS resources
description in a semantic way with the eXtensible Markup
Language (XML)
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