AIMS

AGROVOC in Latin America: workshop of users + community based maintenance

On Nov. 18-19, 2010 I participated in the first workshop of the AGROVOC latinamerican community of users. It took place in Lima, at the local office of IICA. After the worshop, I dedicated the rest of my staying in Peru to work with the editors involved in a pilot project of community-based editing of AGROVOC in Latin America. 
 

Workshop of Latin America community of users

 
The workshop was organized by IIAP (http://www.iiap.org.pe/), ITACAB (http://www.itacab.org/), IICA (http://www.iica.int/Eng/Pages/default.aspx). There were some 20 participants on-site, plus about 20 connected from distance, through a platform managed by IICA. All presentations are available here:  https://mail.pe.iica.int/intranet/Media/AGROVOC.aspx?path=dia%201
 
 
The workshop went very well, in terms of participation, interest, and appreciation of the WorkBench. A number of institutions signed a statement of interest in continuing and participating in the Latin American community of AGROVOC users.


The main points discussed during the workshop:
 
  1. copyright issues
  2. formal organization of the community
  3. working groups and areas of interest at regional level
  4. definition of workflows at community level
  5. avoid duplication of work
  6. role of FAO with respect to the latinamerican community
 

Copyright issues

 
Two concerns emerged:
 
a)      that work of future editors and institutions be acknowledged properly. Until now, specific versions of AGROVOC were maintainted by single institutions, see for example: http://aims.fao.org/website/Partners/sub. Now, with the WB, the latinaomerican version of agrovoc could grow at community level, therefore it could be appropriate to have editors and validators in different institutions, working on the same thematic area. The actual mechanism about how to deal with copyright in this setting should be set explicit. 
 
b)     that AGROVOC respect previous copyright licences. For example, in Colombia they have developed a set of some 70.000 terms extending AGROVOC in the area of biodiversity, and published as Creative Commons. They would like to contribute these terms to AGROVOC, but they want to know how this copyright would integrate with the rest of AGROVOC.  

 

Formal organization of the community

 
Participants agreed that the community needs to be formalized, in order to cope with the different requirements that institutions in LA may impose of its members. Current proposal is to have a board elected by participants in the community, to be rotated yearly or so. However, participants agreed that the organization should be as open as possible to new members and to collaboration for work.
 
 

Working groups and areas of interest

 
Participants have identified several areas of interest in which the community could be active, each participating institution depending on their vocation and interest.
 
  1. Training and communication - ITACAB 
  2. Involvement of universities and teaching institutions – ITACAB, Library of Ministry of Environment Peru
  3. Mapping – many, depending on further discussion
  4. International contacts - IICA
  5. Technical support – CONDESAN
  6. Content: biodiversity – IIAP, UNAP
  7. Content: social aspects of agricultura - CEPES
 
When discussing the experience of the first users of Agrovoc, the main issues regard
 
  1. Coverage. AGROVOC should improve its coverage in the following areas: social aspects of agriculture, latinamerican flora and fauna, indigenous communities. 
  2. Modeling of common names for flora and fauna. Currently there is no standard way to indicate explicitly “where” a common name is used. This would mainly be a country (eg. Venezuela, Bolivia). ITACAB has several cases like this, which they wish to aggregate to AGROVOC. 
  
 

Definition of workflows at community level

 
How to chose an editor of the latinamerican version of AGROVOC? And how to chose a validator? What do they do exactly? How to define their area of competence within AGROVOC?
 
There is a request for FAO to formalize requirements and duties, and to point out methodologies and tools specific to the role of “validator” in the Agrovoc workflow.
 
Also, validators should be provided appropriate tools to support their work. For example, it was suggested to have some sort of “thematic RSS” to notify validators when something in their area of interest has been updated.
 
 
 

Avoid duplication of work

 
A general concern is shared by all participants, about how to avoid/deal with possible duplication of work.    For example, a few people present are also NAL editors and they would like to avoid duplicating their work. A number of alternative were discussed or mentioned.
 
  1. Exploit mappings between thesauri, and especially those already made between AGROVOC and the major thesauri in the area
  2. Use the community as a pool of expert that would propose terms in various areas through the WB, terms could then picked up by one or more of the main existing thesauri in the region (Agrovoc, NAL, CABI)
  3. Exploit the linked data approach
  

Role of FAO with respect to the community

 
This point is to be clarified, especially for what concerns the organization of further activities such as training and meetings, the formalization of editorial roles within the workflow, the copyright issues, and in general the funding model of the community.
 
 
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Support to editors of a Latin American version of AGROVOC.  Iquitos and Lima.

 
The pilot project, which started with IIAP only, now also involves ITACAB, UNAP (Universidad Nacional de la Amazonia Peruanan (http://www.unapiquitos.edu.pe/principal.html), and the Biblioteca Amazonia of Iquitos.
 
ITACAB has collaborated with the logistics and the facilitation of the workshop, but is also working on the revision and update of AGROVOC for what concerns plants and especially promisories species of latinamerican. UNAP has joined the project to collaborate in the content (specially Amazonian flora and fauna), and so is doing the Biblioteca Amazonica of Iquitos (especially Amazon geography and indigenous people).
 
I met several times with people from IIAP, UNAP, CETA, and ITACAB. I also gave a training to the five librarians of the UNAP and discussed with them various issues related to their daily use of AGROVOC.
 
A common problem to all of them is the internet connection, which in the entire city of Iquitos is generally of poor quality (because connection is provided by satellite), and very variable, as it depends on weather conditions (it worsen in rainy days) and pick hours, as well as on varying quality of the service provided by companies. This fact must be carefully taken into account when working in the next version of the Workbench.
 
Another common need (especially presented by editors from ITACAB) is to have a standard way to express the geographical usage of common names for plants and animals. In fact, it should be possible to unambiguously and consistently express where (most commonly, in what country) a given common name is used. AGROVOC already has the technical tools for this, but the exact how-to should be clarified to users.
 
In particular, ITACAB is interested in the possibility of using the WB as a tool to digitize their collection of “especies promisorias”, which is currently only printed on paper. We agreed that we will continue further on this.
 
I also met CONDESAN. They are very interested in collaborating with the community of AGROVOC users, especially for what concerns mountains, mountain natural and social environment. They offer technical support to the community.