Siba and me just had a long phone call talking over the taxonomy project. One by one we went through the collated documentation. These documents were collected by the web team are examples of taxonomies used (e.g.ILRI's) and actual MetaData customized for ICARDA (from the RDR and the metadata html tag of the old website).
Siba will bring her expertise to bear by distilling a single draft taxonomy from the various lists. The point is to keep this simple enough so not to make tagging too difficult. Non-librarians need to be able to handle the taxonomy easily.
We agreed on using this CODIS group site as a place to ccordinate our work. The taxonomy is the first step towards the larger project of setting up an Open Repository that can hold all our research outpouts.
Rationale:
To strucute the website and tag entries corectly we need a taxonomy. That is basically a drop-down menu of nested hierarchies from which one chooses tags when adding new content to the website. What we have so far is a set of Research Themes derived from a card sorting exercise with Liz Baily. For that we were drawing on the MTP, the Strategic Plan, the former Mega Projects and some factsheets.
Additionally to research areas the taxonomy also needs to contain countries and regions, agricultural research terms specific to ICARDA, etc. The information management skills of the librarians are needed to build a sub-set of the Agro-Voc Index that is custom-made for ICARDA and not too large to handle. The Meta Data developed for the Research Data Repository (RDR) will be the best starting point for that.
Another important point is to link researchers to resarch outputs (publications, posters, presentations, videos, etc), projects, countries, donors etc. This is needed so we can show profiles of projects, countries or researchers on the website and autmatically generate a list of matching publications and other research outputs. The only reliable link between people, projects and countires we found so far is the Budget Code (BC). Rima Dabbagh has done this job of matching up publications and projects for the CCER of WLI. Rima knows what information can be found where and Siba will talk to her about that. This might not be the only way of doing it, however.