The AIMS initiative tries to facilitate collaboration, partnership and networking among partners by promoting information exchange and knowledge sharing; and to harmonize the decentralized efforts currently taking place in the development of methodologies, standards and applications for management of agricultural information systems; consequently, providing a 'one-stop' access to system designers and implementers.

After several months of preparation, the AGROVOC Concept Server Workbench Verification Phase has been launched today.

The objective of this preliminary testing is to receive feedback on the new structure of AGROVOC (remodelled into a more semantically organized system called the Concept Server) and its functionalities as well as on its collaborative features.

The Verification Phase will be done directly online and via emails over a period of 4 weeks.

A revised version of the AGROVOC Workbench System is now available at http://naist.cpe.ku.ac.th/agrovoc/: 0.2.1 Beta.

This release will expose to the same modules as the previous 0.2 Beta (Food, Health, Pest Control, Policies, Rice, and Science) and make them correctly visualizing also with Internet Explorer web browser.

It has a slightly revised GUI design, and also incorporates:

- an indication of the current selected ontology
- the auto completion features supporting the search functionality
- improved video-help manuals

FAO has recently launched a geopolitical ontology, providing a new mechanism to describe, manage and exchange geopolitical information. The major goals of the geopolitical ontology are to provide a master reference for the FAO Country Profiles and Mapping Information System (FCPMIS), and to offer users with the most validated and updated geopolitical information.

CGIAR and FAO/AGRIS consolidate their common efforts for sharing their knowledge, continuing their collaboration and partnership at the level of data exchange. The successful collaboration between the two organizations is emphasized by the data exchange of several repositories of the CGIAR centres with AGRIS. The work of mapping, transforming to the AGRIS AP metadata and publishing the data from the CGIAR Centres listed below was facilitated because of the excellent collaboration between the AGRIS team at FAO and the Libraries and IT persons of each CGIAR Centre.

From 20 to 22 January, 2009, FAO, IFAD, WFP, CGIAR ICT-KM Program and Bioversity International, will be organizing a 3-day event at FAO's Headquarters in Rome entitled "Knowledge Share Fair for Agricultural Development and Food Security". Submissions are now open for your knowledge sharing cases. The closing date has been extended to 31 October 2008. We are looking for good knowledge sharing practices in the field of FAO's terms of reference. We want to know how knowledge sharing practices, methods and tools have enhanced your work and made your project more successful and effective.

10th biennial International Conference (ISKO 2008), August 5th-8th, 2008, Montreal (Canada)

This article reports a new way of getting access to SciELO full text journal articles using AGRIS AP XML format to harvest SciELO metadata and to include them into the AGRIS repository.

It covers the following main steps of the work carried out:

• Selecting about 43 journals with agricultural thematic from the Web site of SciELO;

• Defining the methodology for harvesting;

• Harvesting legacy data and then doing incremental harvesting for the new data from the selected SciELO
journal articles for inclusion in the AGRIS XML repository;

Knowledge organization systems (KOS), like thesauri and other controlled vocabularies, are used to provide subject access to information systems across the web. Due to the heterogeneity of these systems, mapping between vocabularies becomes crucial for retrieving relevant information. However, mapping thesauri is a laborious task, and thus big efforts are being made

29 September, 2008

A workshop to review progress over the past four years of the CGIAR’s Online Learning Resources Project and plan for the future has made considerable progress towards defining the goals of a third phase for the project.

International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications (DC 2008), September 22nd-26th, 2008 Berlin (Germany)

The AGROVOC master copy is currently being revised by ICRISAT, India. Work is being carried out to improve the consistency and accuracy of the thesaurus, and to better structure it to convert to the AGROVOC Concept Server. The revision of the thesaurus will mainly concern its hierarchical structure, non-descriptors and relationships, that will be better defined and refined.

After completion of this phase, the thesaurus will be converted into the Concept Server. Maintenance will be done by all partners through the online AGROVOC Concept Server workbench.

PRESS RELEASE
September 29, 2008

DRIVER and eIFL.net - Electronic Information for Libraries - have identified demand for cooperation in order to progress and enhance the provision, visibility and application of European research outputs
through digital repositories.

DRIVER is a joint initiative of European stakeholders, co-financed by the European Commission, to establish a flexible, robust, and scalable infrastructure for all European and world-wide digital repositories,

After releasing version 0.1 in December 2007, the new version of the Workbench 0.2 Beta is now available through: http://vivaldi.cpe.ku.ac.th:443/agrovoc02beta/.

After releasing version 0.1 in December 2007, the new version of the Workbench 0.2 Beta is now available through: http://vivaldi.cpe.ku.ac.th:443/agrovoc02beta/.

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 repositories. In the field of

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 April 24 – June 15, 2008. AgLR 2008 was supported and promoted by the Agricultural Learning Repositories Task Force (AgLR-TF, http://aglr.aua.gr).

In May 2008, FAO approved a project that will provide an upgrade to the FAO Country Profiles Mapping Information System (FCPMIS) launched in 2002. The project aims to enhance users' access to country information on FAO's expertise and increase collaboration among FAO's technical divisions and decentralized offices as well as partners in other organizations.

Metadata interoperability allows the exchange and preservation of crucial learning and teaching
information, as well as its future reuse among a large number of different systems and repositories. This paper introduces work around metadata interoperability that has taken place in the context of the Agricultural Learning Repositories Task Force (AgLR-TF), an international community of the stakeholders that are involved in agricultural learning

In the last few years a strong need has emerged for a standard way to interchange various types of information, such as on organizations, projects, experts, events and news, in the agricultural

In late 2006, an online global survey to determine the scope and priorities for the WSIS Action line on e-Agriculture was conducted by an inter-agency Working Group. Most of the over 3400 respondents were unfamiliar with the term 'e-Agriculture; but nearly all respondents had suggestions on potential definition and benefits, as well as on priority areas for action. Perceptions of e-Agriculture focused on information and communication processes more than on technologies and tools.