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.

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

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

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.