In the context of the process towards coherence in agricultural information systems and in coordination with the Content Management Taskforce set in place by the Expert Consultation on International Information Systems for Agricultural Science and Technology (Rome, 2005), FAO and GFAR have proposed an Application Profile for describing Organizations (for a detailed explanation of what an Application Profile exactly is, go here).

The Application Profile was presented at the AgrisContent Taskforce meeting in Wageningen (March 2007) and is published on the FAO AIMS website (and linked from this page) for comments and feedback. The permanent url of the DTD is: http://www.purl.org/agmes/organizationap/dtd/. 

GFAR has also proposed a global workflow and architecture for managing information about organizations according to the principles of decentralisation and subsidiarity that are specific to the mandate of GFAR. The project is based on a distributed architecture with a central Registry File in order to manage information on Organizations uniformly on a global scale.

The Taskforce gave mandate to GFAR to follow up on this project and we decided to share the process and the state of the related activities in the "Coherence in AIS" section of our Open Site so that anyone can add comments.