E-Agriculture

Introduction, Objectives, Background Note for Discussion and Summary of Week 1

Forum
Forum: "Building the CIARD Framework for Data and Information Sharing" April, 2011

Introduction, Objectives, Background Note for Discussion and Summary of Week 1

The international CIARD initiative (http://www.ciard.net) is working to make agricultural research information publicly available and accessible to all. Among its actions are advocating for and promoting open access, improving applicability and enabling effective use of data and information in agricultural research and innovation.

  Challenges and opportunities

Knowledge generated from  agricultural  research should be easily accessible and  so easily taken up  by  agricultural researchers  and the  agricultural  community at large. This issue is always more  vital in the face of rapidly  shifting  challenges such as climate change, transboundary  pests and  diseases, effectively use of water for agriculture, combating desertification and degradation of fragile soils and managing agricultural biodiversity.

Conventional pathways for communicating research outputs, through scientific publications (journals etc) and face to face events, have been enriched by new digital formats including the newer social media such as wikis, informal blogs and online communities of practice. The volume of  outputs of agricultural research  such  as  scholarly  or informal  publications, blogs, discussion forums, institutional directories  and very importantly raw data, is rapidly increasing.

Whereas an increasing amount of information becoming available represents an enormous opportunity, a challenge exists in the scattered way in which this information is being made available.  The  sources of information have become more heterogeneous  and  so coordination and coherence has become more problematic, making it more difficult to share data and information efficiently within and between scientific communities and more importantly with the wider range of stakeholders involved in agricultural innovation systems.

New approaches have to be adopted to facilitate sharing without resorting to tight
coordination and centralization, which, for political and logistical reasons, are not
foreseeable in the current spontaneous proliferation of data sets and services in agriculture.

This is where the current trends  in information technology and web practices represent a unique opportunity to develop a coherent framework for sharing agricultural information.

Approaches like Web 2.0, Linked Data, the OAI-PMH protocol, etc., are all means of
improving the interoperability1 of  distributed information and datasets without requiring strict coordination or the omologation of the software and data environment.

The CIARD partners are organizing a series of international consultations (through electronic and face to face events) to build a framework for action in making outputs of agricultural research truly accessible through coherent management, sharing and exchange of knowledge, information, and data. This background note is the basis for a discussion on the e-Agriculture platform from April 4 to 15.  The e-consultation  will be followed by an expert meeting  in Beijing in June 2011 with the same title. These two events will be an exercise in describing the current status and analyzing the needs for  tools, standards and infrastructures, leading on to defining future actions.

   Background Figures

Scientific publication and data production is growing at a much faster rate than ever before. Figure 1 charts the increase in numbers of articles indexed by MEDLINE from 1950 to 2010. The rate of increase in publication has clearly risen, especially since the year 20002, but the production of scientific papers is only the tip of the iceberg.

                     

 

Figure 1. MEDLINE-indexed articles published per year


Behind growing numbers of scholarly publications is a growing amount of scientific data. Furthermore, scholarly papers are no longer the  only  way in which scientific information is exchanged. Researchers are using more social platforms such as blogs3 to discuss results before they are published in scholarly journals or after they have been published.

Data on publication rates in agriculture are not readily available, but it is quite clear that the trend will be similar, although  perhaps  less dramatic, to the other  life sciences which are monitored by MEDLINE.

The second graph shows  that the  steeper  increases in publication  rates since 2000 is mainly due to the entrance of a few large countries with so-called "emerging economies",

                    

Figure 2. Thomson Reuters. Web of Science Database

 

especially China, Brazil and India, into the scientific mainstream. Taking 1990 as a base, Brazil has increased its scientific production by 800% and China by 1200%.
The  growth  of  these key  new players in the scholarly communication arena  has  made interoperability  a  more  important global issue, with special regard to the handling of languages other than English.

   Objectives of the e-Consultation

The CIARD partners aim to provide an opportunity to discuss some specific questions that will provide resource material for the expert consultation that will follows in Beijing. The econsultation has the following objectives:

  • To increase awareness about  opportunities  and technical options for creating  an infrastructure for data interoperability;
  • To create a list of discussion points about the current state of the art of sharing and interoperabilty in the agricultural research context as basis for the discussions of the expert consultation in Beijing;
  • To provide suggestions for actions that will enable increased sharing and exchange of data in agricultural research and innovation.

 

1 Interoperability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interoperability
2 http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/ Last accessed March 2011
3 See as an example ScienceBlogs http://scienceblogs.com/ Last accessed March 2011