The two days conference on open agricultural data, which was initiated by the G8 governments and hosted by USDA and the worldbank was this afternoon successfully concluded. The concluding press release is at  https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4aXVC8hUc3oeEd2NE56LUpzcDA/edit and the  national action plans are documented at  https://sites.google.com/site/g8opendataconference/action-plans

President Obama greeting the participants at the G8 open agricultural data conference.

On the first of May, the day after the G-8 International Conference on Open Data for Agriculture, a special G8 side event will be held at International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) headquarters in Washington, DC.

The event is entitled D8 - Open Data for Agriculture. D stands for data. 8 is for the number of five-minute presentations to stimulate awareness, thought and action on Open Data.

Learn about IFPRI’s Open Data for Agriculture

What’s available, who’s using it, how they’re using it, and how you can access it. The event will feature the following 8 speakers:

On April 23 and 24, BLE (the federal agency for agriculture and food) organized a workshop on linked open data in agriculture. More than 70 practitioners from federal agencies, agencies of the "Laender"  and research institutions came together to discuss opportunities and challenges of linked open data.

The report of the third iMarine Board Meeting is now avalaible for download. The meeting took place at FAO Headquarters in Rome on 25 and 26 March, 2013. For a detailed description of the outcomes of the meetings, read iMarine's blog iMarine - The journey ahead.

The Board meeting was followed by the iMarine Advisory Council Meeting on Wednesday 27 March 2013: An important objective of this meeting was to provide the Advisory Council with directions on project progress and opportunities for the developed products and services.

I am attending at the moment the INRA seminar on "Open Science" which is one of the first steps to implement the new INRA policies on opening research data.

Some snapshots from the workshops are at  https://twitter.com/johanneskeizer.  The presentation I will give tomorrow is at  http://www.slideshare.net/Keizer/2013-04-inra.

The presentations from the RDA launch meeting are now available.

I want to point you specifically on two presentations that I found exciting:

• Manfred D. Laubichler. A Computational Research System for the History of Science and its Connections to Bioinformatics, Evolutionary Theory and Open Data
• Peter Fox. Can it get any more important than this?

At the RDA launch meeting, March 18-20,  an "Agricultural Data Interestgroup"  was founded. The initial members were from India, France, Greece and FAO of the United Nations.

Figure 1. Slide that shows the RDA mechanims

The "Agricultural Data Interestgroup" will discuss and pursue all topics related to management and interoperability of data sets which are  important for agricultural development and innovation. The domain interest group will represent all stakeholders producing, managing, aggregating, sharing or consuming data from/for agricultural research & innovation. It will

The German Federal Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition (BLE) in collaboration with Other German Organizations and FAO of the UN is organizing a workshop on Linked Open Data in Agriculture. The workshop will take place on April 23 and 24 in Bonn (Germany). Now numerous registered participants from German professionals working on Agricultural data have already registered.

You will find detailed program of the workshop attached (in German).

G-8 International Conference on Open Data for Agricuture

Washington, D.C. - April 29-30, 2013

At the 2012 G-8 Summit, G-8 leaders committed to the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, the next phase of a shared commitment to achieving global food security.

As part of this commitment, they agreed to “share relevant agricultural data available from G-8 countries with African partners and convene an international conference on Open Data for Agriculture, to develop options for the establishment of a global platform to make reliable agricultural and related information available to African farmers, researchers and policymakers, taking into account existing agricultural data systems".

Conference Goal

EFITA2013 is a joint conference of three associations, EFITA, WCCA and CIGR VII sponsored event. All these associations deal with the future use of ICT in the agri-food sector, bioresource and biomass sector. This year the conference will be held in Turin, from June 24 to June 26.

Authors are invited to send their abstract through the on-line platform prior to February 15, 2013. The abstracts should not exceed 500 words. An abstract is indicative of the final paper quality, and therefore authors are urged to prepare concise, clear and informative abstracts describing their work with emphasis on objectives and results. Accepted abstracts will be published in a book that will be included with the rest of documentation for registered participants, so special attention should be paid to its presentation.

Call for abstracts

Each abstract should include: