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Access to agricultural information ensures that stakeholders in the farming system can make informed decisions towards increasing agricultural productivity. Agricultural information and data are stored in distributed systems and repositories (using different pieces of software and databases) that expose a variety of research outputs with various metadata formats. Often grey literature, journal articles and technical reports are lost as technologies are not employed to ensure that such resources are online, accessible and shared widely within the agricultural stakeholders. This paper reviews AGRIS (International System for Agricultural Science and Technology) as an international collaboration and partnership in collecting and using agricultural bibliographic data to enable researchers and policy makers retrieve related agricultural and scientific information and data. AGRIS database, therefore, uses bibliographic data as an aggregator of locating related content across information systems available on the Web through taking advantage of the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data technologies. Besides linking related content, AGRIS has a potential to gather like-minded researchers around AGRIS content to discuss and share ideas – this implies creating a social media layer by creating AGRIS social media.

The Agricultural Information Management Standards (AIMS) portal provides to information specialists in the agricultural domain good practices and methodologies on the management and dissemination of agricultural information by using widely accepted standards and methods. AIMS is a resource container where users can find experiences in applying semantic technologies and information standards to agricultural situations from related partnerships within (or for) the agricultural domain. AIMS is facilitated by the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations with support from an external Consultative Group which provides feedback and guidance on technical improvements, outreach activities, new services, and strategic recommendations. This paper reviews the AIMS portal as a reference place for agricultural information management professionals with regard to standards, tools and methodologies for managing agricultural information and systems. It provides an overview of the AIMS portal content and the AIMS Community. Initiatives, such as the development and application of the AGROVOC Linked Open Data (LOD), Linked Open Data Enabled Bibliographic Recommendations (LODE-BD) or OpenAGRIS, are some of the products that are of interest to the agricultural information management community. The paper concludes with a sample re-enactment of how access to the AIMS portal may help an information management specialist to solve an archetype information management scenario.