I got today my letter of engagement for two years as visting professor at the Institute of Intelligent Machines of the Chinese Academy of Science (IIM, CAS). Professor Rujing Wang, Deputy Director of the Institute is very keen to intensify the contacts with our team at FAO in Rome.

Johannes Keizer at his presentation for staff of IIM, CAS

Prof Qian from the Agricultural Academy of Science in Beijing is setting up a new laboratory at IIM, CAS on the Chinese Agricultural Ontology Service. My appointment as visiting professor is in this context. We agreed to elaborate a common workplan and to talk about the exchange of staff between the groups.

Nearly 50 faculty, graduates and postgraduates participated at the speech I give at the occasion of the awar to a Visiting Professor. The presentation (https://www.johanneskeizer.com/files/AOS-CIARD-China.pdf) was the same presentation, which I gave at the Beijing conference, a day before, but concentrating more on general aspects of the semantic Web, but also talking more about FAO-s mission. An interesting discussion followed the presentation.

The IIM-CAS in Hefei as more than 500 staff and graduate and post graduate students. They are working on Biometic Sensing, Intelligent Information Systems and Biomimetic Micro Nanotechnology. In the area of Agriculture they are developing an Agricultural Vertical Search Engine to create a dataware house from more than 5000 websites in China. This is the basis of "www.sounong.net", which is widely used by the Ministry of Agriculture.