The use of widely-used metadata standards is essential to guarantee the visibility and retrieval of documents stored in open repositories. Attention should be paid to the creation and exchange of meaningful metadata to enhance interoperability amongst repositories and provide value added services. Since 2005 the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) provides the agricultural information management community with standards, services and tools to assist open repositories in benefiting from the advantages offered by Semantic Web publishing.

The agINFRA project focuses on the production of interoperable data in agriculture, starting from the vocabularies and Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs) used to describe and classify them. In this paper we report on our first steps in the direction of publishing agricultural Linked Open Data (LOD), focusing in particular on germplasm data and soil data, which are still widely missing from the LOD landscape, seemingly because information managers in this field are still not very familiar with LOD practices.

The GFAR theory of change defines the initiative’s vision of success, the preconditions and conditions necessary for the vision to be achieved, the strategic levers required, the expected outcomes and a coded distribution of which sub-initiatives within GFAR will contribute the different elements. The TOC can then be used to identify the key indicators of change and the methods and approaches to measuring performance as part of an MLE framework and MLE operational plan moving forward.