AIMS

AIMS Newsletter no. 24, November 2013

AgINFRA : Major Achievements

Launched in November 2011, the aim of the agINFRA project is "to design and develop a scientific data infrastructure for agricultural sciences that will facilitate the development of policies and services that promote the sharing of data among agricultural scientists in a manner that develops trust within and amongst their communities" (Susan Rotus, AIMS).

During this month the second review meeting which will take place in Athens (Greece) focuses on the evaluation of the project in the following areas:

  • Efforts undertaken to exploit the agINFRA Grid Infrastructure and to deliver enhanced services for workflow and task execution.
  • Integrated services to showcase the agINFRA Linked Open Data technology like AGRIS, the international Information System of the Agricultural Science and Technology, and the Global Learning Network.
  • Infrastructure elements, like VocBench and the CIARD RING, released as production systems. The VocBench has also attracted a lot of interest outside the project being now used by the Publication Office of the European Commission and the European Environmental Protection Agency. Currently the CIARD RING contains  1,000 registered information services becoming a central instance for the discovery of agricultural science and technology datasets.
  • agINFRA Science Gateways using the grid infrastructure for computer heavy operations. They have been published together with multiple APIs to link to these services.

Highlights from & about the community

  • The EU has updated the rules on the re-use of public sector information (PSI), publishing the revised PSI Directive. To give practical recommendations to the public authorities on how to implement the new rules, the Commission will soon publish a set of guidelines and start a consultation process. More info
  • The 9th International Conference on Open Repositories (OR2014) will be held 9-13 June 2014 in Helsinki, Finland. The call for proposals is open. This year's conference theme is: Towards Repository Ecosystems. More info
  • The National Agricultural Library (NAL) of the USA, CABI and FAO agree on collaboration in the development of their thesauri. Goal: to develop a global agricultural concept scheme to concentrate and streamline the efforts of the 3 organizations in the delivery of shared vocabularies. More info
  • Agricultural research organizations met last October to discuss opportunities offered by the new Horizon2020 program of the European Commission. More info
  • The Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (ALECSO) and the German Technical Cooperation (GIZ) will move Arabterm.org into Linked Data. AGROVOC is the first candidate for linking to Arabterm after its conversion into RDF/SKOS, and VocBench may be used for Arabterm - Linked Data maintenance. More info

Upcoming Events

Glossary

What is Harvesting? An automated, regular process of collecting metadata descriptions from different sources to create useful aggregations of metadata and related services. (Resource: ANDS)

More information:

5 Questions in 5 Minutes with Xavier Ochoa

Who are the users of AIMS and what do they think about agricultural information management standards? This month we asked Xavier Ochoa, Professor of Computer Science at the Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral (ESPOL) in Ecuador, to answer 5 questions on AIMS, agINFRA and agricultural information management in general, the issues and possibilities.

Read the interview “Coming from Latin America, the main issue agricultural researchers face is access” with Xavier Ochoa in the AIMS Interviews section.

The scope of the AIMS Newsletter is to bring under the attention of the AIMS community recent news, events and achievements in the field of agricultural information management. If you have any contribution, suggestion, or need assistance with the newsletter, please contact us at [email protected]

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