AIMS adds service on aginfo events

The Agricultural Information Management Standards (AIMS) website is an initiative aiming to improve the coherence among agricultural information systems in order to create a clearing house for information management standards, and to share and promote the use of common methodologies and tools. To reach the above mentioned goals, AIMS provides semantic-based services in the agricultural domain by providing resources such as metadata standards, methodologies, knowledge organization systems, online – and web services.

As a new feature among its online services the AIMS Events Service is now available. It is a regularly updated list of meetings, workshops and conferences as well as other activities associated with agricultural information management standards.

You can also follow upcoming events on the AIMS-Events Twitter account.

We are encouraging everyone to give Feedback regarding the service on the Meetings, Conferences and Workshops on AIMS Forum

If you are not member of AIMS yet, please register here.

Visualizing meeting discussions with wordle

In the closing session of last week's Rome ShareFair, we used www.wordle.net to visualise the topics discussed.

The first visualization used the pdf version of the ShareFair programme as the source of terms. Wordle allows you to create such a picture from a set of text, in this case we focused on the 50 most frequent terms. Interesting in this ex-ante picture is the prominence to the organizations organizing the event.

On the morning of the final day of the ShareFair, we made a similar visualization from the feed from the ShareFair blog. As in the first picture, the term 'knowledge' was prominent. Interesting however, the organization names disappeared to be replaced by terms like 'people' and 'methods.'

Enrica Porcari at the CGIAR did the same analysis for the sharefair feed from the ICT-KM blog, concluding that "a picture is worth a thousand words."

It looks like a very useful - and flexible - tool to stimulate discussions.

The closing session ppt is on slideshare