The Reference System of the German Agricultural Information Network (dainet) as a Central Element of a Modern Information System

The German Agricultural Information Network (DAINet) is the world ́s largest reference system in the agricultural area on the Internet. DAINet was established to catalogue and to describe worldwide existing agriculture information and to make them available to users. This lecture illustrates the organization of DAINet and the redundant developmental structure of the system. It also explains the organizational requirements for ZADI in developing DAINet. Beyond that, the article reports about the current focal points of development which guarantee a permanent operation on a long term basis by using modern database technology.