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.

The Share Fair aims to be a positively interactive event, providing the possibility for Staff to showcase their experiences in knowledge sharing and at the same time learning from each other. The FAO Atrium will be transformed into a colourful market place. Market stalls and booths, along with workshops and short presentation sessions aim to provide an ideal opportunity for lively discussions and getting to know people. The Fair will showcase approaches for synthesizing knowledge in a way that makes it readily useful for the next person or teams wanting to learn from previous experiences.

The Semantic Web is currently one of the most interesting and ambitious challenges that the scientific and technological community is facing. While great progresses have been made in terms of consolidation of base philosophy and infrastructure, new issues, technologies and tools are emerging.

These issues include creating, presenting and managing Semantic Web content, making semantics explicit in order to automatically integrate data from different sources, and to search for information based on its meaning rather than its syntactic form.

With the successful completion of the Knowledge Workshop earlier this year, we are happy to announce a new opportunity to learn and exchange knowledge sharing techniques. As in the previous workshop organized by the Institutional Knowledge Sharing project of the ICT-KM, this workshop will be divided into three phases, including both online and face-to-face components. For more information and to register for a limited number of seats, please review the attached flyer.

Making learning resources available online on a global scale, could be an enabler for the development and welfare of agricultural and rural populations. One mean to achieve this aim, is the development and promotion of a global infrastructure that will facilitate sharing and reusing of learning resources on topics related to agricultural and rural development. To this end, the experience of stakeholders that are involved in the development and operation of agricultural learning repositories would be of extreme value.

In the field of agricultural education, specifications and standards produced in the area of agricultural learning technologies have not yet been widely adopted and implemented. Sharing, preserving and reusing learning information among a large number of different systems and repositories would not only lead to wider dissemination of learning technology standards for educational applications but also help reaching a potential consensus of related work by comparing and harmonizing similar/competing approaches.

A "Special Session of the Agricultural Ontology Service Initiative: semantic problems and semantic solutions in agricultural knowledge and information products" will take place as part of the IAALD-AFITA-WCCA Conference. The aim of this session is to showcase practical applications of semantic tools. The contributions will be of specific relation and relevance to agriculture and related subject areas and are not expected to be generic papers about semantic tools.

The aim of the Special Session on Agricultural Metadata and Semantics of MTSR'07 is to bring together researchers and practitioners that are working on agricultural knowledge production, organization, and exchange from a Semantic Web perspective.

It aims to serve as a discussion forum where interested experts will present the results of their work, and establish liaisons

The DSpace Community with the collaboration of FAO of the United Nations, CASPUR and CILEA are pleased to announce that DSpace Meeting is going to take place on October 17-19, 2007 at FAO (Rome, Italy). The aim of the DSpace Users Group Meeting 2007 is to bring together the various initiatives and key players that are working on innovative applications and mature installations of DSpace in order to share their experience and to advance in the development of the repository software.

The purpose of this two-day Agricultural Ontology Service workshop is to bring together Information and Knowledge Managers from Agricultural Institutions, who are working on development of semantic standards and their application. This workshop will focus on assessing the work done since the first workshop of 2000 in Rome to date. The achievements of the past seven years and the lessons learnt will be used to pave the road for the next steps.

The AGROVOC Thesaurus was developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Commission of the European Communities (CEC), in the early 1980s. AGROVOC is the foundation that underpins the development of the Concept Server (CS) project. Using the knowledge contained in vocabulary systems and thesauri such as AGROVOC, the CS will be able to develop specialized domain-specific terminologies and concepts that will better support information management in the Web environment.

The October 2005 "Expert Consultation" brought together key stakeholders in at least two separate initiatives to address the goal of developing coherence in international information systems for agricultural science and technology. At the meeting three taskforces were formed on "Content Management", "Capacity Building" and "Advocacy" to carry the process further. The taskforce on "Content Management" refers to itself as Agriscontent. First face-to-face meeting of part of the group took place during the First Meeting of the African Chapter of IAALD in Nairobi, May 2006.

The world of scholarly communications is witnessing a watershed revolution, as path-breaking as when the first scholarly journal appeared in the 17th century. The Open Access movement has been widely embraced not only by the scholars but also by Governments, policy makers, professional bodies, publishers, R & D Centres, and institutions in the private and public domains.

The goal of the Seventh AOS workshop is to provide a platform for implementers to demonstrate how ontologies can extract and acquire additional knowledge from existing agricultural information systems. It aims to bring together research communities, with special focus on agriculture, whose members are interested in efficiently capturing knowledge and in creating representations and formalizations that can be useful for reasoning and knowledge discovery.

The main theme of the Conference is "Agricultural Information Technology for Rural Development". In recent year, IT sector is growing exponentially and offers an immense potential for its synergistic effect on the growth of all sectors including agriculture. The challenge ahead is to explore the opportunities provided by the IT revolution to ensure a vibrant, responsive, sustainable and productive agriculture.

GFAR Triennial Conference 2006

"Reorienting Agricultural Research
to meet the Millennium Development Goals"
In 2000, GFAR established the tradition of holding a Triennial General Conference, during which representatives of its stakeholders meet to collectively reflect on current global issues, and map out the outline of a forward looking programme of collaboration among its various constituencies that takes cognizance of topical global issues and concerns.

AMARC 9, the 9th world Conference of AMARC, will take place in Amman, Jordan from the 11 to the 17 of November 2006 (http://www.amarc9.amarc.org ). The Internet Jordanian pioneer and FM broadcaster Ammannet (http://ammannet.net) will host the conference in partnership with media and journalists groups from Jordan and Palestine. AMARC 9 will bring together up to 300 or 400 community broadcasters from more than 110 countries and all regions of the world.

ICUDL 2006 is the second in a series of International Conferences on Universal Digital Library. The conference aims to add to the foundation of the Universal Digital Library (UDL) that will be a portal to foster creativity and free access to all human knowledge. The Million Book Project (MBP) is considered the first milestone towards building this digital library with a free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books in various languages belonging to diversified cultures and civilizations available to people worldwide over the Internet.

Seventy percent of the world’s hungry live in rural areas on less than one dollar a day and depend on agriculture to obtain food or the means to buy it. Unfortunately, the agricultural sector is starved of investment and rural communities lack support for education, information and health.The key investors in agriculture are producers in small communities dedicated to farming, and the larger producers such as agribusiness companies. They face many barriers including the lack of credit, insecure land tenure etc.

Knowledge is the key to mastering the challenges of the future in international cooperation.

It is a topic of fascinating complexity that touches on many aspects –from the political, economic and socio-cultural through to the ethical dimension.

GTZ is devoting this year’s Eschborn Dialogue on 5 and 6 September 2006 to the theme KNOWLEDGE POWERS DEVELOPMENT – Sharing experience, shaping the future.

Over 400 representatives from the fields of politics, business, academia and civil society will be discussing knowledge in all its diversity with development experts.