In the afternoon of Tuesday 20 I had the appointment at CAAS to talk with Dr. Meng about the future of our collaboration with Agrovoc and the Chinese Agricultural Thesaurus. Dr. Meng introduced his new team and especially Dr. Zhang Xuefu, the new technical contact for AGROVOC and the CAT.
I presented the new development around AGROVOC, the transformation to a Concept Server and the AGROVOC conceptserver workbench.

Dr. Zhang developed 4 points of collaboration in the usage of the AGROVOC/CAT mapping:
a) multilingual search in information systems
b) use of the workbench by CAT
c) multilingual visualization
d) multilingual retrieval and visualization.

Dr. Zhang and I

In our discussion we developed some precise projects out of this:
01 CAAS will try the AGVCS-workbench to manage CAT. FAO will deliver the source code of the workbench to CAT as soon as version 1.0 is released
02 CAAS and FAO will develop a chinese Interface to the FAO website/AGRIS. This interface will use the CAT/AGROVOC mapping file to facilitate the building of search queries in Chinese. As start up, FAO will develop a page in Chinese based on AGROVOC to access AGRIS in Chinese
03 CAAS and FAO will develop a multilingual Interface to the CAAS abstract database. This interface will use the CAT/AGROVOC mapping file to facilitate the building of search queries indifferent languages. FAO will deliver CAAS access to the Multilingual Semantic Search Assistant for the use in this project

The start of project 1 and 3 cannot be before february 2009. During November/December FAO will elaborate a more precise proposal for these projects.

Furtheron was discussed to have a technical workshop on AGROVOC and CAT use lateron in spring 2010.

I briefed the chinese colleagues on the CIARD initiative and the upcoming CIARD event for Asia and the Pacific in Hyderabad.