Innovative ICT Tools for Information Provision in Agricultural Extension (December 2005)

aAQUA is an online multilingual, multimedia agricultural portal for disseminating information from and to the grassroots of the Indian agricultural community. aAQUA simultaneously addresses two major challenges in farmer outreach programs - geographic reach and customized delivery. It answers farmers queries based on the location, season, crop and other information provided by farmers. aAQUA makes use of novel database systems and information retrieval techniques like intelligent caching, offline access with intermittent synchronization, semantic-based search, etc. Agricultural content repositories (digital library), Agri-price information (Bhav Puchiye), farmer schemes and various operations support databases (aAQUA-QoS) have also emerged from the experience of aAQUA deployments. aAQUA's large scale deployment provides avenues for researchers to contribute in the areas of knowledge management, cross-lingual information retrieval, and providing accessible content for rural populations. Apart from agriculture, aAQUA can be configured and customized for expert advice over mobile networks and the Internet in education, Healthcare and other domains of interest to a developing population. This paper will showcase the utility of various component databases built into aAQUA to enhance the QoS delivered to rural populations