The FAO Country Profiles is now embedding news and events related to agriculture, forestry, fisheries and rural development published by FAO partners and registered in the innovative and fast-growing AgriFeeds service.

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.

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.