In order to facilitate better collaboration between agricultural research actors and ensure more effective management of research projects and more rational funding, it is desirable to have access to comprehensive information on people's expertise, areas of activities of Institutions, existing projects in specific areas and countries, related events and publications.
An existing project that aims at something similar is VIVO, started at Cornell University in 2003. VIVO is a research-focused discovery tool that enables collaboration among scientists across all disciplines at Cornell University. It allows to browse information on people, departments, courses, grants, and publications following an ontology-based navigation.
Cornell University, the Global Forum on Agricultural Research and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations are working on an adaptation of the VIVO model for agricultural research, called AgriVIVO.
AgriVIVO integrates data from several large agricultural research management communities into a VIVO RDF store, customizing the ontology model to the organization of agricultural research, focusing on the relationships between people, institutions, projects, topics, events, and geographic locations.