To enable better networking and collaboration in agriculture, AgriVIVO, managed by the GFAR Secretariat and developed jointly with Cornell University and FAO, has been launched: http://www.agrivivo.net.

AgriVIVO is a search portal built to facilitate connections between all actors in the agricultural field, bridging across separately hosted directories and online communities.

AgriFeeds, the agricultural news and events aggregator, has been enhanced.

The service now relies on more robust technology and uses better methods to aggregate contents and browse them.

AgriFeeds allows users to search and filter news, events and job opportunities from several agricultural information sources: search results are then made available as RSS feeds for further re-use.
All aggregated contents are categorized under broad topics based on the topics of the data sources and are automatically indexed by country, therefore users can subscribe to feeds by topic and feeds by country.

AgriFeeds is now built on the latest version of Drupal: more posts providing technical details on this new implementation will be published in the AgriDrupal group on AIMS.

The next version of AgriFeeds will have a still improved semantic backbone: it will tag all contents with AGROVOC concepts and it will provide a SPARQL endpoint.

One of the the most interesting developments around VIVO is the coordination with other international initiatives trying to set standards for both describing experts / researchers and their research activities and uniquely identifying them across systems.

At VIVO 2012, two keynote speeches on the first and second day of the conference highlighted two important aspects of making research activities and results more accessible.

During a workshop on "Unifying Researcher Profile and Research Resource Information" at the VIVO 2012 conference in Miami, we did a group exercise to model the rationale behind AgriVIVO using an improvised requirements ontology. The exercise was conducted together with Stella Mitchell from Cornell University and Melissa Haendel from the Oregon Health & Science University. Jon Corson-Rikert from Cornell University captured the exercise in a VITRO installation where the model can be navigated and the ontology further refined.

Although an exercise and not comprehensive, this model can be useful to further define the stakeholders, goals, requirements, tools and challenges involved in the project.

The CIARD RING China working group organized two workshops in June and July 2012 to raise awareness on the objectives of the CIARD RING and train staff of Chinese agricultural science Institutions in the use of the RING portal. Part of the workshops was dedicated to the illustration of the registration process and all participants were encouraged to register the information services of their Institutions.

The first training course was held on 5-6 June 2012 in Beijing.

Trainees were staff of agricultural institutions from Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Henan, Hebei, Shandong, Shanxi, Tianjin and Beijing. Dr Meng Xianxue, deputy director of the Agricultural Information Institute (AII) of Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), addressed the audience at the opening ceremony. Dr Pan Shuchun, senior officer of the CIARD RING China working group, presided the meeting. Dr Sun Wei introduced the CIARD RING structure, the functionalities of the system and the registration process. Read more on the RING website...