The CIARD RING is a registry of agricultural information services and data sources.
Currently, there are 623 infromation services registered in the RING by 388 organizations.

The audience of the RING is mostly information managers and developers of information systems in agriculture.

Below are described the usage scenarios that have been identified so far for the RING.

1. Consumers of the information

1.1. Generic users looking for information sources with specific coverage  

2. Information service managers looking for suitable sources for their information service

3. Developers using the RING for harvesting from new data sources

2. Providers of the information

2.1. Data providers who want to make their datasets and/or information systems available
These are the core target users of the RING: the RING metadata model is built in order to allow them to describe their services / data sources in details, with special focus on technical information about their interoperability, to facilitate re-use on the part of other service providers.

2.2. Service providers who want to manage metadata about their harvester / aggregator and related source datasets
This is mostly the case of services that give access to resources aggregated from several sources: the managers of these services may want to register in the RING all their data sources with all the technical details relevant for the service, in order to exploit the RING model and metadata to implement part of their service's workflow.
At the moment, the RING treats such services as "networks": network managers can register their data providers and related data sources and assign them to their network: once a data  source is assigned to a network, additional metadata relevant to that network can be provided.
In the future, this relationship between service provider and data provider will be implemented using the DCAT catalog / dataset model.

The DCAT model: