This report provides the summary of the discussions that took place during the Agricultural Learning Repositories (AgLR 2008, http://aglr.aua.gr/econf.php) E-Conference. AgLR 2008 aimed to explore the needs and requirements of stakeholders involved in the development and operation of agricultural learning repositories. It was organised as an electronically facilitated discussion, during...
Purpose – The main purpose of this paper is to present the work recently carried out by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in collaboration with Associazione per la documentazione le biblioteche e gli archivi (DBA) in Italy to make web CDS/ISIS-based applications compliant with the...
In technology-enhanced learning, metadata interoperability has been identified as an important issue. It allows not only the exchange and preservation of crucial learning and teaching information (such as competency profiles, learning activities, and descriptions of learning resources), but also its future re-use among a large number of different systems and...
This document describes the software architecture for implementing a system for managing the fisheries ontologies lifecycle, cornerstone of WP7. The lifecycle described in this deliverable is an instantiation of the possible lifecycles that can be carried out with the NeOn toolkit, and has been selected according to FAO needs, style...
The task to identify a subset of about 400 terms highly relevant to crop wild relatives was performed as a continuation to an earlier project where a set of about 11400 term was extracted from on-line sources. Terms with high relevance were grouped into themes, roughly corresponding to Agrovoc (top...
Research generated in developing and emerging countries is currently “missing” from the international knowledge bases because of financial consequences affecting its publication and distribution. Much of the scientific research output from Africa for example, is in form of grey literature and hardly accessible. FAO is the specialized United Nation agency...
This document describes the Ontology Learning experiments we performed in order to recommend a set of ontology learning techniques to enhance the ontology engineering process in the fisheries domain in place at FAO. Experiments have been conceived in the wider context of the WorkPackage 7 of the NeOn Project. The...
There is a consensus that Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) hold great promise for development by connecting people to more accurate and up-to-date sources of information and knowledge. However, the evidence so far shows that the benefits accrued from the utilization of ICTs have been inequitably distributed with most developing...
AGROVOC is a Multilingual Agricultural Thesaurus developed by FAO. AGROVOC was basically "born" in English, or at least was (and still is) oriented to Western-European languages (mainly EN, ES, FR). However, over the years, the need of translating it in multiple languages arose, in particular in the non-European Chinese and...
Current challenges regarding the frame of reference and control of African digitisation projects pose serious questions about their future direction. The author suggests practical strategies aimed at mainstreaming resources and increasing African control, including the need for readers of Innovation – librarians, information scientists, archivists, and historians – to engage...
