Agriscontent task force meets in Wageningen

Following discussions in Rome in October 2005, FAO has convened several task forces looking at ways to enhance the coherence among different agricultural information systems.

In early March 2007, members of the 'agriscontent' task force met to take stock of progress and to identify potential new areas for collaboration in the field of content management.

Issues discussed were:

• The Open Access publishing paradigm
• Subject vocabularies and advanced semantic applications
• Newsfeeds and Web2.0 approaches
• Integrated systems
  

Participants also formulated conclusions and recommended further actions in preparation for the second Expert Consultation to be held in Rome in September 2007.

Read the full report.

Tags: agricultural information agris fao

Join GFAR project to share information on agricultural organizations

The Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR) seeks interested people to contribute to a joint project to easily share and update information on organizations in agriculture.

According to GFAR's Valeria Pesce, "All agricultural research and development organizations need updated and reliable information on other organizations and institutions, their expertise, projects and outputs." The problem is they each tackle the problem independently.

At the March 2007 meeting of the AgrisContent Taskforce, it was suggested that a 'distributed architecture' might work, in which organizations maintain basic standard information about themselves. GFAR, with FAO was tasked to further detail the proposed architecture [see the proposal].

To proceed with this project, Valeria and her colleagues need feedback on the proposal and the participation of as many organizations as possible. She will ensure that their collaboration only requires a very simple task: creating their own
description in the standard format, for which we will also provide a user-friendly web page that will automatically format the description.

Tags: agricultural information organizations gfar