At the beginning of october I participated at the Big Data Conference, organized by "bigstep" in London - in the context of the world wide Bg Data Week. I was there to learn if AI could be useful in the context of the goals of Sci4D (https://www.sci4d.org).

On September  13th I arranged the visit of a delegation from the Chinese Academy of Science (Institutes in Lhasa and Chengdu) to Orvieto.  The delegation was welcomed in the city hall by mayor Germani and Councelor Cannistrà. Both sides emphasized the necessity of strengthening cultural, scientific and economic relations.

 The eROSA project (e-Infrastructure Roadmap for open science in agriculture and food - https://erosa.aginfra.eu/front)  has been successfully completed.  The Roadmap forsight paper has been  submitted to the EU and has been published at https://zenodo.org/record/1314186#.W6J4begzYwG.The final evaluation meeting was hold on September 13.

On my recent trip to China I had the chance to present the outcomes of the eROSA project to my friends of the Agricultural Information Institute at CAAS. The CAAS people are very much interested in the follow up and want to be an active partner of the agINFRA community.

Last week I accompanied a delegation from Guangdong Animal Husbandry group in a Study tour to Germany and Wageningen.   China is the biggest producer of pigs.  China becomes also always more the greatest market for pigs. China is now part of 6 among the 10 biggest trade streams.  GK group is a big state farm and its Animal Husbandry Section is one of the big pig producers.

On Europe and countries - thoughts after Brexit

On March 28, I chaired a session data interoperability, which was jointly organized by the 3 entities.  (https://apan.net/meetings/apan45/session.php?id=18#sn1) 

During the Agricultural Data Interest Group I participated in a meeting of the GACS/GODAN working group. Main result of this meeting was the redefinition of GACS as "Global Agricultural Concept Space" in stead of "Scheme".   The existing scheme in GACS is only an exemple for many more schemes to come to create a real interoperation hub for vocabularies in the AgriFood System.  Basis of the discussion was a position paper authored my Tom Baker and myself ();