Yesterday I represented FAO in the final review of the D4Science project (https://www.d4science.eu) here in Brussels.

D4Science is a project to build Virtual Research Infrastructures, in which scientist can collaborate despite of different locations or disciplines.

D4Science run 2008 and 2009 with FAO participation in 2 workpackages, Community Building and Outreach work. Marc Taconets team is involved in using the D4Science framework for several research communities in the fishery and aquaculture area. Our team was responsible for the outreach work and the D4Science website. Our presentation about the outreach work is attached.

The review had a very positive result. The reviewers were impressed about the created technological framework and also about the initial impact on specific user communities.

FAO with again our team and Marc Taconet's team is also partner in D4ScienceII a follow up project that started in October 2009. It's main goal is to achieve interoperability between the D4Science Infrastructure and other Infrastructures.

I think in D4ScienceII it will be necessary to think not only about technologicalo interoperability, but also about semantic interoperability. D4Science data need to become linked data and they need to link to other data.