"I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything..." (Richard Feynman)
My group is collaborating with ICRISAT and the Indian Institute of Technology in the AGROPEDIA Indica project. My colleague Margherita Sini and I were invited to participate in the "Rice Workshop" of the project. I gave a keynote in the opening session which is attached,
Program Committee of a Workshop on Learning Technology Standards for Agriculture and Rural Development, which is scheduled to take place on 19 September 2008 in the context of the 4th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies in Bio and Earth Sciences (HAICTA 2008, http://infolab.aua.gr/haicta/conf/).
I am participating today in a meeting of the stakeholders in the Initiative for International Information Systems in Agricultural Science and Technology.
I am participating at the moment in the conference titled above. The openig keynote from Bruce Perens was very interesting in discussing the economic importance of openSource software. He pointed out that no software development that is crucial for the business success of a company will be open, he called that differentiating technology, but that, in the moment a software goes on sale, is not differentiating any more. In these cases the openSource model shows to be more powerful.
On October 29 and 30 the Workshop on the European Information Space was hosted in FAO and co-organized by my team. The workshop brought together projects from two different directorates of the DG Information Society and Media. It was organized by the DILIGENT (Digital Library Infrastructure on Grid Enabled Technology). Donatella Castelli from the CNR in Pisa, the DILIGENT coordinator succeeded in bringing together numerous projects funded by the EU in the area of Digital libraries and in the area of Research Infrastructure-
From October 16-17 my group co-organized and hostend the DSpace Usergroup meeting 2007. (http://www.aepic.it/conf/index.php?cf=11) My colleague Imma Subirats was one of the pillars of the entire organization. I got quite excited about DSpace and the possibilities to adapt it to Agricultural Open Archives.
I was also intrigued by the connections between DSpace and the MIT Simile project that brings a "semantic dimension" into the DSpace development. http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=1660131278&size=m
During the e-agriculture week at FAO Headquarter, I participated in a CGIAR workshop on "opening Access to Agricultural research. I think there is big confusion among various stakeholders about the linkings between research, technology deployment and Extension. It seems to me that there is a tendency to apply criteria, which have value for extension and technology deployment (relating to the end users i.e) also on research. I still think that research should be as much as possible independent from application szenario, but should resolve scientific problems.
September 23 and 24I took part in the organization of the second expert consultation on Information Systems in Agricultural Science and Technology was hold in Rome at FAO HQ.
A very interesting part of the conference were country reports from (among others) Egypt, Peru, Madagascar and Thailand.
On the 21st and 22nd of September the 8th Agricultural Ontology Service workshop took place in Rome at FAO HQ. This workshop was particularly aimed to shape the AOS community and to outline the future of the Initiative. More than 40 people from more than 10 countries participated.
I am at the moment in Singapore at the DC2007 meeting. I delivered a keynote in the first session after the introduction by Dr Vivian Balakrishnan, Singapore's Minister for Community Development, Youth & Sports and Second Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts.
The two months of the E-Conference have come to a fruitful end. This was an extremely valuable opportunity for the whole AGROVOC Team to understand the requirements and needs of the community as evidenced from the extremely useful discussions we have had in each phase of the conference.
From June 13-16 I visited Mann Library at Cornell University in Ithaca to speak about common projects.
Following an invitation of the Metadata Working Group, (http://metadata-wg.mannlib.cornell.edu/forum/) I gave a talk on the "AOS - Initiative". My presentation is attached.