"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)
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, (https://metadata-wg.mannlib.cornell.edu/forum/) I gave a talk on the "AOS - Initiative". My presentation is attached.
From June 11-13 I participated in the meeting of the GFIS Implementation group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, USA. GFIS is the Global Forestry Information Service (https://www.gfis.net), a partnership operation of IUFRO, CIFOR (CGIAR), NBII (US-Gov), FAO and other partners.
In these weeks an electronic discussion conference about AGROVOC takes place. More than 150 practitioners from all over the world subscribed to the conference and more than 50 are activiely participating. Topics are the coverage of AGROVOC, governance, language versions, institutional collaboration and others. The last phase, which just started will discuss the AGROVOC concept server.
From February 20 -23 I participated in the ICSD in Bangalore, organized by ARD Prasad from the Documentation, Research and Training Center of the Indian Statistical Institute in Bangalore. My group presented the Ontology based electronic FNA journal and the proposal for an AGRIS OAI architecture. I was furthermore Theme Speaker in the session on "Institutional Repositories and Case Studies" and participated in the concluding Panel discusion on "Semantic Web and Digital Libraries:Research & collaborations".
I was invited to deliver a keynote at the Central Europe Conference of the eFarmer project (eFarmer Central European Conference 2007). The title of my presentation is "Knowledge Exchange Infrastructure for Agricultural Research and Technology" (see attached file). The eFarmer project has been granted by the EC in the context of the eContent Program.
It is taking a new approach. Focussed on building the European Digital Library. Preservation at the moment relatively small part, but it needs to grow because very many research questions to cope with in the area of digital content.
Technology enhancend learning. Different approach than elearning upto now. Elaerning was about remote access to learning. That is not a research topic anymore. NO WE should look how technology will support those who are teaching.
I am participating in the Information days of the Directorate e of the IST area of the European Commission. The Director Harald Forster, and the 2 Unit heads, Pat Manson (Digital Libraries and Technology enhanced Learning) and Roberto Cencioni (Intelligent Content and Semantics) have organized this meeting to inform about the possibilities and constraints to present projects to be funded within FP7. There are more than 300 participants from throughout Europe.
We have been invited to present a project within the "proposals clinic".