Thematic harvesting of agricultural resources from generic repositories

Metadata aggregators and service providers harvest entire collections or they restrict harvesting by date or sets. However most often user approach to collections is not by dates or set names but by domain based keywords. Harvesting by domains is an issue when service providers attempt to collect data from multiple sources. The main problem is that harvesters, at present, do not have the facility to distinguish themes such as domains. In the present work, an attempt has been through Tharvest, a thematic harvester model using the proposed methodology harvesting agricultural resources from generic repositories. Tharvest encompasses a process where technical terms of the domain of agriculture are taken from AGROVOC, a multilingual, structured controlled vocabulary designed to cover concepts and terminologies in the agriculture domain. AGROVOC is deployed to provide the basis for selective harvesting. The system components and workflows are presented and described.Metadata aggregators provide end-users a single platform discovery facility to resources collected from various data providers. It is observed that aggregators such as INDUS [www.drtc.isibang/ac.in/indus] dealing with agriculture and related domains facilitate aggregating metadata from not only repositories but also other sources such as journals and enable a centralized access to full text and objects. While harvesting can be fairly simple and straight forward, it is not without its challenges. This paper intends to highlight some of the issues in harvesting metadata in agricultural domain. The particular focus is to identify agriculture related metadata from generic sets.