Organizations registered at AgriFeeds (as of 11/01/2008) are:

• Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR)
• Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement (CIRAD)
• Department for International Development (DFID)
• Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
• Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA)
• Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR)
• Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA)
• Interamerican Institute for Cooperation in Agriculture (IICA)
• International Association of Agricultural Information Specialists (IAALD)
• International Water Management Institute (IWMI)
• National Agricultural Library (NAL)
• Wageningen UR
• World Food Program of the United Nations (WFP)

We have recently published “AgriFeeds” as a service to study and provide aggregation of news and events feeds in the domain of Agriculture, Fisheries, Forestry and related subject areas. Although a feasibility study, the idea it to provide a one-stop access point to agricultural news and events, possibility to filter them based on certain filter criteria such as:

• All news related to climate change or avian influenza
• Know more about all the upcoming events in Africa or Syria or in any specific country on a specific topic
• Add events to your Outlook Calendar (iCal support)

The site is part of a “feasibility” study to see the nature of news/events feeds and promotes the Ag-Event Application Profile for sharing event information. All comments and suggestions on its improvement are appreciated!

At a recent conference in Corfu Jorge Cardoso from University of Madeira gave a keynote summarizing a report which will appear in the IEE Intelligent Systems. The report titled The Semantic Web Vision: Where are We? basically is a result of a survey which was conducted between December 2006 and January 2007 of approximately 627 participants.

Most interestingly, the report concludes that:

“the large majority of ontologies developed are rather small. It shows that the Semantic Web does not even need OWL and can achieve important objectives such as data-sharing and data-integration using just RDF alone. “

Interestingly enough, the first day’s keynote speaker, Grigoris Antoniou from University of Crete and FORTH, also stressed that although rules are needed to further exploit the real strength of ontologies, lot can already be done by RDF(s).

GFAR, FAO and WISARD have started to work on Project Metadata. All the up to date information on the expected work and outputs is available from the AGRISCONTENT Wiki!

The agenda of the 8th AOS workshop is available from the AIMS website. The agenda boasts a great line-up of presentations on Ontology and Metadata Tools, Methodologies and Tools for Ontology creation and Community Building.

The purpose of the E-conference is to gather requirements for further AGROVOC enhancement directly from the AGROVOC user community, in order to analyze and incorporate those needs in the medium to long term plan and strategy, for the most used Agricultural thesaurus since 1980. AGROVOC is one of the resources that FAO are using in the NeOn Over-fishing Alerts Case Study.

The E-Conference has been a great success. A total of 43 countries are represented in the Conference. From the list of those who registered, over 55% are from Asia and the Pacific, Africa and Central and South America.

Read a recent article about the Conference on the NeOn Website.

Full report will be made available to everyone via the AIMS website.

Gauri Salokhe, FAO.

A case study on FAO’s semantically navigable “Food, Nutrition and Agriculture Journal” is published by W3C. More specifically, it is published by the Semantic Web Education and Outreach Interest Group (SWEO). They are tasked to collect proof-of-concept cases (prototypes and full implementations) that demonstrate successful use of Semantic Web technologies.

Read the FAO case study from: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/UseCases/FAO/

Dear all,

in response to both Myra Wopereis-Pura’s request for advice in building the new FARA website and the suggestion from Marc Bernard that EGFAR should host some pages on how to best build a website in the agricultural field, of course in the framework of the coherence process, GFAR created a new section on the EGFAR Open Site (a part of the website where everyone can add and edit contents) called “Building and enhancing ARD websites“.

We decided to make it collaborative so that suggestions are not one-sided and everyone can provide advice and describe new tools. Users can also add new sub-sections if they wish.

I started writing something (on “Coherence in AIS”), but we would really like all the members of this Taskforce to contribute with their knowledge, and then we are going to involve the larger target of all our stakeholders.

In order to add or edit contents, visitors should register on our website (either from the Open Site itself or here), which is a very quick procedure asking only for very basic information (and for email confirmation). Once registered and logged in, you can go to the section where you want to add / edit contents and use the “Add new here” or “Edit this” links.

I hope you will find this tool useful.

Looking forward to receiving your feedback,

Valeria

________________
Valeria Pesce
EGFAR webmaster
GFAR Secretariat
www.egfar.org

During our last meeting in Wageningen, the issue was raised of what the overall workflow should be in managing information on organizations in a decentralized way in order to avoid the proliferation of databases and the problem of duplication, and a distributed architecture with a central Registry File was proposed in order to manage information on organizations uniformly on a global scale. GFAR has been asked to follow up with a project proposal in collaboration with FAO and other members of the Content Management Task force.

The proposed architecture is available for comments here.

All the members of the Taskforce are welcome to give their feedback on the blog, on the wiki or on DGroup. Also, if you want to add comments or make corrections on the document itself, we published an editable web version on the EGFAR website here. Feel free to add your comments (preferably in a different color and with your name in brackets).

If you like, I can also post the full-text version here on the blog, but I am not sure if this is good practice.

Thank you,

Valeria Pesce
Global Forum on Agricultural Research