The 2^nd BioVeL Workshop on taxonomic and phylogenetic workflows titled “Developing interdisciplinary methods for conservation biology and ecosystem research –  taxonomic and phylogenetic workflows in biodiversity research”, took place between 10-11/5/2012 at the premises of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. The workshop was organized by the BioVeL (Biodiversity Virtual e-Laboratory) FP7 e-Infrastructure project and the Lifewatch initiative. The aim of the workshop was to bring together various stakeholders in the context of biodiversity (such as biologists, ecologists and bioinformaticians) so that collaboration and exchange of ideas and experiences are promoted. 

The workshop was attended by more than 60 people, mostly consortium members of the BioVeL project, as well as members of related FP7 projects such as ViBRANT (Virtual Biodiversity Research and Access Network for Taxonomy), & agINFRA, Lifewatch initiative and members of Natural History Museums. It consisted from a number of keynote speeches and presentations of tools, workflows and services used in the area of biodiversity research, as well as breakout sessions where the participants were split in groups and discussed specific topics related to the theme of biodiversity research, providing solid suggestions. In addition, the possibilities for collaboration between the participating projects were investigated. 

Additional information about the workshop can be found at the Workshop’s web page.

If your paper written under the framework of the agINFRA FP7 project was accepted for publication, you must follow the rules of Open Access in FP7 which can be found here http://www.openaire.eu/open-access/open-access-in-fp7.

We are pleased to send you BioVeL Newsletter No. 1. In this edition you will find a letter from the project coordinator, Alex Hardisty, and a general presentation of BioVeL's consortium. Several articles present updates on the development of the project services and workflows. The last pages are dedicated to past and upcoming events.

We hope that you will find this Newsletter interesting. We will welcome your comments at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

agINFRA joined representatives from ViBRANT (http://vbrant.eu) and BioVeL (http://www.biovel.eu) to discuss areas of overlap and cooperation between the three projects.

At a broad-brush level, ViBRANT is providing biodiversity users with a collaborative platform (Scratchpads, http://scratchpads.eu) and populating that environment with various tools and services.

BioVeL is focussed on workflows, both project designed and user-contributed, that can potentially be executed in a turn-key manner.

agINFRA is focussed on the more applied end of the biodiversity spectrum and thus gives the other two projects the scope to extend their activity range away from their more academic origins. Most importantly, though, agINFRA is the only one of the projects that is basing its activities in LOD.

AgINFRA was represented by 21c Consultancy at the launch of the 'Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index' (WEAI) at the Houses of Parliament on the 7th of March 2012. WEAI has been developed to measure women's empowerment, agency and inclusion in the agriculture sector and to provide new venues for research and policy-making. This event enabled the AgINFRA team to engage in high-level networking, as the main speakers included: Dr Meredith Soule, Senior Technical Advisor, USAID Bureau for Food Security, Dr Ruth Meinzen-Dick, Senior Research Fellow, the International Food Policy Research Institute and Dr Sabina Alkire, Director, Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, University of Oxford.

Project partners from INFN (Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics) and FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) successfully met to discuss agricultural information management business needs and how they could be resolved by the agINFRA project.

The January 4th meeting in Rome at FAO headquarters included four representatives from each group who spent the morning presenting their respective organizational strengths before closely examining three scenarios. The first scenario involved an existing FAO component that uses its well-known multi-lingual agricultural thesaurus to automatically index documents, websites and other information resources. A limiting factor has been the CPU-intensive nature of the process. INFN representatives noted that it was an excellent scenario for the grid infrastructure due to the facility with which such a process could be parallelized over the grid.

Check out here the EFITA Newsletter which contains information about agINFRA.

About the Project

OpenAIRE (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe) gives content providers the means to promote and realize the widespread adoption of the Open Access Policy, as set out by the ERC Scientific Council Guidelines for Open Access and the Open Access pilot launched by the European Commission. As another partner project of the FAO, OpenAIRE is dedicated to promoting European open access policy. The project works to raise awareness of compliance practice and encourage the open source publication of all FP7 and ERC framework projects.