The document discusses FAO's experience with standards development and adoption, current developments with SDMX, and how e-infrastructures could help facilitate standards adoption. FAO has developed and adopted various vocabulary standards for species, thesauri, and metadata. SDMX is used at FAO for statistical data exchange but has limitations that FAO is addressing by strengthening communities of practice and integrating SDMX with semantic technologies. An e-infrastructure could further help by providing transformation and mediation services across domains to link different standards, and by facilitating the development of linked open data which could lessen the importance of strict data exchange standards.

1. Interoperability and standards adoption: FAO’s inputs a) FAO’s experience in the development and adoption of standards b) Current SDMX developments c) A conjecture: how an e-infrastructure will help Marc Taconet, Anton Ellenbroek, FAO Networking session September 2010 Brussels (Belgium) www.d4science.eu D4Science-II project | Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations