Organizing information for the Agribusiness Sector: Embrapa’s Information Agency

In this paper, details of Embrapa’s Information Agency will be presented. It was designed as a space for exchange of knowledge among farmers, agricultural researchers and rural extension technicians. In the system, information is organized using two criteria. Firstly, every identified resource is cataloged in accordance to Dublin Core Metadata Standard. Secondly, a set of terms belonging to the domain of discourse of farmers, rural extension technicians and researchers is identified. Those terms were organized in the form of a tree and embedded in the system’s navigational structure, which provides an option for hyperbolic tree visualization. Since hyperbolic space provides an exponential amount of room, there is a natural balance between the exponential growth in the number of nodes and the space available as tree depth increases.