A G8 side event, ‘DE Open Data for Agriculture,’ is to be held after the 1^st of May will commence in Washington DC at The International Food Policy Research Institute headquarters. The summit will focus on the recent G8 leader’s pledge to commit to world food security. This promise stipulates that developed nations should communicate, converge and share their intellectual property, and open up their publicly funded agriculturally relevant data across borders and with developing nations exposed to climate risk.  The title of the conference stands for data and the eight minutes permitted for presentations designed to stimulate and galvanise awareness and interest on open data. The all encompassing cause of this event is to establish options for a global platform that makes information reliable and relatable to African farmers; in the hope of reaching sustainable farming to combat the crisis in food security and climate. Noted speakers will include; Neil Fantom from World Bank, Soonho Kim from Food Security Portal and Melanie Bacov from Harvestchoice.

For more information, please check: http://bit.ly/15908m6

The AIMS Metadata Group of Interest has introduced a webinar entitled ‘How to select apporporiate encoding strategies for producing Linked Open Data (LOD)- enabled bibliographic data that will go live on the 30^th April 2013.  The Webminar will be held but Professor Marcia Zeng from Kent State University, and Imma Subirats, knowledge and information management officer at the Food and Agricuture Organization of the UN.

This webminar is part of a series of webinars that were launched by Linked Open Data @ AIMS in December 2012.  The main objectives are to introduce information management specialists into the initiatives related to the Semantic Web that is currently taking place within the AIMS Community of Practice.

The Webinar will be based on Linked Open Data (LOD)- enabled biographical data which aims at providing bibliographical data providers of open repositories  with a set of recommendations that will support the selection of appropriate encoding strategies for producing meaningful LODE-BD. For more information about the webminar, please follow the link to their website: click here.

The G8 International Conference on Open Data for Agriculture will be taking place in Washington, D,C from the 29-30^th April 2013. The main aim of the conference is to urge developed countries into demonstrating a sense of commitment into investing in projects that open access to publicly funded global agriculturally relevant data streams. It is hoped that such projects will allow for greater access for African, as well as worldwide users, so that a more sustainable means of fighting food insecurities can be developed and adopted on a worldwide scale.

Mr Johannes Keizer, the Information Systems Officer at FAO of the United Nations shared his views on the importance of Open Data for agriculture, and what the aim of the conference was in an interview conducted by AIMS. During the interview, Mr Keizer stated that he believed that open data is crucial for researchers and decision makers as the data that would be readily available would allow for better agricultural models that were climate friendly to be developed. It would also allow for policy makers to construct policies that better target agricultural producers.  Mr Keizer expressed that the main challenges that this task faces are transforming the data in order to make it more practical for those who would gain from using it.

The Reasearch Data Alliance launch meeting that was held from the 18^th-20^th March 2012, saw the emergence of the  ‘Agricultural Data Interest group’ , which was founded by members from India, Greece and FAO of the United Nations.

The Agricultural Data Interest group will manage all topics related to management and interoperability of data sets which are important for agricultural development and innovation.mThe interest group will ensure that the interests of all stakeholders that work do produce, manage, aggregate, share or consume data from or for agricultural research and innovation purposes are looked after. The interest group will work to bring to the surface any existing problems and experiences; pave the way for a number of domain specific working groups within Research Data Alliance, and also serve other working groups as a domain case.

The interest group is considering to set up a ‘working group on interoperability of Wheat related information systems’ , which will adhere to the wheat initiative. The aim of this group is the create a “cookbook on exposing and linking wheat related databases/repositories”.

LACRO 2013, the Workshop on Learning Objects Analytics for Collections, Repositories and Federations, will take place in Leuven, Belgium, on April 9, 2013. The workshop is organised jointly with International Learning Analytics & Knowledge Conference 2013, taking place in Leuven, between April 8 and April 12, 2013 (LAK 2013 – for more details please visit http://lakconference2013.wordpress.com/).

LACRO 2013 is now launching the first call for papers, with the submissions deadline on February 15, 2013. The Workshop aims to bring studies and demonstrations for any kind of analysis done on learning resource collections, from an interdisciplinary perspective. Digital collections are considered not as merely IT deployments but as social systems with contributors, owners, evaluators and users forming patterns of interactions on top of portals or through search systems embedded in other learning technology components. Among the topics addressed, LACRO 2013 will include: innovative services and systems for learners and curators based on LO analytics, requirements for the collection of analytics in Learning Repositories and Federations, approaches to address big data problems in collecting analytics in Learning Repositories and Federations and much more.

For further details, please click here

Building Blocks for a Data Infrastructure and Services to Empower  Agricultural Research Communities, is the title of a recent paper on the agINFRA project. agINFRA  is a European Union project (funded under the 7th Framework Programme) and aims to provide agricultural research communities with e-infrastructure and services for open data access, sharing and re-use. This paper presents the projects objectives and data principles while it also summarises the data resources that are covered by the project. agINFRA  facilitates the sharing of broad range of data types which includes; bibliographic data on scientific and grey literature; digital learning and training resources; Geospatial information systems; Plant germplasm and genomics information and Agricultural statistics. The paper provides a step by step approach as to how agricultural research institutions and other stakeholders can participate in, and benefit from, the project.