I had a meeting this morning at the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, in which participated the Undersecretary Stefano Boco, Paolo Dini from the London School of Economics, Francesco Nachira Section Head (Digital Ecosystems) from the European Commission and representatives di T6, an Italian non for profit private company,
Background of this meeting is our collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, in the Deal project. (https://www.iitk.ac.in/infocell/iitk/newhtml/storyoftheweek32.htm) . Jayanta Chatteree, the project leader pointed Paolo Dini to us for an eventual involvment in European/Italian projects on Digital Ecosystems.
The obvious goal of the meeting with the Ministry was to mobilize interes for funding of an Italian or cooperation project realizing Digital Ecosystem Infrastructure.
Outcome of the meeting: Stefano Boco was very much interested. He wants an Information Infrastructures that is able to shorten the production chains in the Italian Agroindustrie and limits mediators (as an exemple he pointed to Oranges,harveste Sicily, brought for an auction to Bologna and come back repacked to Sicily). He mentioned that Italy has the longest production chains in Agriculture and especiallist the largest intermediation sector in Europe. He wants to know if modern knowledge exchange systems can improve this situation. It was decided that a 4 page paper will be written within 6 weeks, which the Undersecretary will discuss with the Farmer's organizations. Then he might introduce this into the program of the ministry with a 1 budget .
We were obviously involved because of our experience in formal knowledge encoding (ontologies) which would be essential for the project. I committed at the moment only to revise the document that will be drafted now by the folks from London School of Economics.