ROME (PINA) — A network of global food and environmental research organizations has launched a new online search tool.
It comes ahead of next week’s “World Food Summit: Five Years Later” in Rome and is aimed at revolutionizing the way people access specialized agricultural and development information.
Available at http://infofinder.cgiar.org, the Info Finder is a collaborative effort between:
– the World Agricultural Information Center operated by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations;
– Future Harvest Centers around the globe;
– and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.
“Availability of agricultural information is growing massively on the Internet,” says Francisco Reifschneider, the director of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.
“Users will quickly see the benefit of the Info Finder because it helps rapid access to the wealth of the agricultural knowledge generated by the Future Harvest Centers.”
Info Finder is partly based on FAO’s own in-house technologies. These search for online information catalogued using common standards such as keywords from the widely used Agrovoc agricultural thesaurus.
Said World Agricultural Information Center manager Francisco Perez-Trejo: “Embracing partners to extend the scope, impact and sustainability of agricultural information management systems is one of FAO’s chief mandates.”
Created in 1971, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research is a leading development partnership supporting a knowledge network of 16 Future Harvest Centers.
