Reinterpretable representation of information in a formalized manner suitable for communication, interpretation, or processing. (ISO/IEC 25024:2015 clause 4.5)
The Aral Sea was an endorheic lake lying between Kazakhstan in the north and Uzbekistan in the south. Formerly one of the four largest lakes in the world with an area of 68,000 km2, the Aral Sea has been steadily shrinking since the 1960s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects. (European Space Agency, 2017. The changing Aral Sea https://earth.esa.int/web/earth-watching/image-of-the-week/content/-/article/the-changing-aral-sea/)
Metadata standards offer conventions for the generation and description of research data. They specify and define the structure of metadata. (https://www.researchdata.uni-jena.de/en/information/metadata-and-metadata-standards)
Ontological specifications that are published as a standard or as a part of one, to maximise semantic interoperability. (Fernández-Izquierdo, Alba & García Castro, Raúl. (2021). Conformance testing of ontologies through ontology requirements. Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence. 97. 104026. 10.1016/j.engappai.2020.104026.)
Metadata is set of data that describes and gives information about other data. (Land Portal Foundation, 2024. Land Library Metadata Model https://landportal.org/library/metadata)
An ability is the power an agent has to perform various actions. (Wikipedia. 2025. Ability (disambiguation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ability_(disambiguation))
The ability of machines and equipment to create, exchange and consume data due to clear and shared expectations regarding the contents, contexts and meaning of those data. (Ceccarelli, T., Chauhan, A., Rambaldi, G., Kumar, I., Cappello, C., Janssen, S. & McCampbell, M. 2022. Leveraging automation and digitalization for precision agriculture: Evidence from the case studies. Background paper for The State of Food and Agriculture 2022. FAO Agricultural Development Economics Technical Study No. 24. Rome, FAO.)
The Semantic Web is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web)
The expression “best practices” can be defined as the best examples of practices: which methods, tools, or approaches have been shown to be the “best” in a specific situation. (http://www.fao.org/docrep/017/ap784e/ap784e.pdf)
Note
As “best practice” may imply that no further improvements are possible, the term “good practice” may be more appropriate. As for good practices, examples of best practices should also imply ease of transfer to other situations with similar goals.
Machine learning (ML) is a type of AI that uses computer algorithms to automate analytical model building. It is based on identifying patterns in data to improve machine performance by more accurately predicting outcomes without explicit human instructions. (FAO. 2023. Using artificial intelligence to assess FAO’s knowledge base on the technology accelerator. Rome. https://doi.org/10.4060/cc6724en)
Ontology learning is the automatic or semi-automatic creation of ontologies, including extracting the corresponding domain’s terms and the relationships between those concepts from a corpus of natural language text, and encoding them with an ontology language for easy retrieval. (Adapted from Kaninda Musumbu. Semantics Web and Ontology Learning. 3rd International Conference On Application Of Information And Communication Technology And Statistics In Economy And Education, Dec 2013, Sofia, Bulgaria. pp.s 7-4. hal-00965607 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00965607/document)
