Question 1: What are we sharing and what needs to be shared?
The landscape of information and data flows and repositories is multifaceted. Peer reviewed journals and scientific conferences are still the basis of scholarly communication, but science blogs and social community platforms become increasingly important. Research data are now increasingly managed using advanced technologies and sharing of raw data has become an important issue.
This topic thread will address and discuss details about the types of information that need to be shared in our domain, e.g.:
Information residing in communications between individuals, such as in blogs and
community platforms supported by sources such as directories of people and
institutions;
Formal scientific data collections as published data sets and their associated
metadata and quality indicators, peer-reviewed scholarly journals or document
repositories;
Knowledge „derivatives‟ such as collections of descriptions of agricultural
technologies, learning object repositories, expertise databases, etc.; And surely more...
There are several interesting examples of successful data exchange between distributed datasets, and some of them in the area of agricultural research and innovation. There are also ambitious attempts that still have to live up to expectations. A common characteristic of most examples is that they are based on specific ad-hoc solutions more than on a general principle or architecture, thus requiring coordination between "tightly coupled" components and limiting the possibilities of re-using the datasets anywhere and of replicating the experiment.
In some areas there are global platforms for sharing and interoperability. Some of these address the need to access scholarly publications, mostly those organized by the publishers, and others address the interfacing of open archives. With regard to standards and services in support of interoperability, there are several very successful initiatives, each dealing with different data domains. Among document repositories, the most successful initiative is surely the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting used by a global network of open archives. The strength of this movement is changing the face of scholarly publishing. Geospatial and remote sensing data have strong communities that have developed a number of wildly successful standards such as OGC that have in turn spurred important open source projects such as GeoServer. Finally, in relation to statistics from surveys, censuses and time-series, there has been considerable global cooperation among international organizations leading to initiatives such as SDMX and DDI, embraced by the World Bank, IMF, UNSD, OECD and others.
Singer System1, GeoNetwork2, and GeneOntology Consortium3 are examples of successful initiatives to create mechanisms for data exchange within scientific communities. The SDMX4 initiative aims to create a global exchange standard for statistical data.
There are more examples, but these advanced systems cannot have a strong impact on the average (smaller, less capacitated) agricultural information systems, because overall there are no easy mechanisms and tools for information systems developers to access, collect and mash up data from distributed sources. An infrastructure of standards, web sevices and tools needs to be created.
1 Singer System http://singer.cgiar.org/ Last accessed March 2011
2 GeoNetwork http://www.fao.org/geonetwork/srv/en/main.home Last accessed March 2011
3 GeneOntology Consortium http://www.geneontology.org/ Last accessed March 2011
4 SDMX http://sdmx.org/ Last accessed March 201
Dear All,
Good day!
Data sharing in Web 2.0 based ICT initiatives suffers from jumbling of data which does not recognize the end user--whether it is for researchers, extension specialist, farmer, policy maker, so on and so forth. A multi-stage data storage management system with proper credit of sharer is essential.
Thanks and regards.
Asad, are you saying that data should be validated in the sense of "schema validation" -- i.e., making sure the data conforms to a format and constraints understood by particular software applications?
Or do you mean "validation" to refer to an evaluation of the quality of information or to verification that the information comes from a reliable source (or even that it has been vetted by experts)?
Both senses of validation are significant but would require different approaches.
To my approach, agricultural data should managed by the data owner, aggregated in local/regional data centers. Thus, unlike peer reviewed published articles, and because we are looking into ample amount of data, we should expect data validation and veracity to vary from one source to another.
I think that we should think of some mechanisms that will rank data for completeness, integrity, etc. This will allow us to reach more information, and if the source is marked as fickle, yet appealing by its content, one might approach directly the data manager for clarifications.
In agriculture sector we are sharing both basic and applied information notably, market information, information regarding improved technologies including varieties, breeds, husbandry practices, processing or value addition and appropriate engineering. It is important to note that it is a small population that is “truly” sharing. Many people all over the world even in developed countries do not want to share. It is worse In Africa where researchers want to receive or access information that is available but they do not want to make theirs available for others. This is poor culture which we have lived with and it will take long to get out of us. Many breakthrough findings are many times kept in individuals’ homes or computers. However, the younger generation is very open to making their information and knowledge accessible. There are some who need to share but they do not know the different ways of making their information and knowledge accessible. This requires capacity development to gain skills in how to do it. ICT infrastructure in some organizations is poor. Computers are shared if available, otherwise it is only the head of the organization who has a computer (his or her secretary), Internet access is inadequate and very slow and in some cases applications that allow sharing are not available to the extent that no matter how much one want to avail what he or she has, it is impossible. Lobbying for continued Investing in ICT by countries and organizations will go a long way to equip the researchers and supporting staff with prerequisite infrastructure.
Research scientists typically collect data, analyse the data to produce results, then write the results up in a paper.
Notice something odd about this? Yes, that's right: data and papers get a good mention in the introduction to this topic, and extensively in the many posts, while you have to look very hard indeed to find anything that vaguely touches on results.
Now, this is really very strange, because:
So, in response to the question "What needs to be shared", I would put in a strong plea for research results. If that's too broad, then "research results obtained by statistical analysis of raw data" would be a pretty good place to start.
(I realise that there are plenty of issues regarding standard ontologies etc, but as a first approximation these are the same as the ones relating to actual data, so this suggestion does not introduce major additional barriers to implementation).
<p>Perhaps you could consider the NetCDF standard for sharing research results.</p>
<p>http://flowcyt.sourceforge.net/netcdf/latest.pdf</p>
<p>http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/docs/netcdf/index.html#Top</p>
Good day,
I'm Sandra from Seychelles. Been wanting to participate in this forum since last week but our server was down, and this week when we are having internet connection its a health related issue keeping me from participating.
Nevertheless I will just give my view and experience from Seychelles for the past 2 years.
As mentioned by another participant, information in the context of Africa have not really been shared yet we all want information from others. Anything to do with research has been regarded as personal belonging or that of an institution. This is something which needs to be changed. If we really want whatever work we've done in terms of research, to be applied and help in the development of Agriculture and achieving food security, the only way forward will be to share the information. Even if we are not personnally acknowledge for the effort, at least we will get the personal satisfaction that we've made a difference.
In Seychelles under a SADC project we came to realise that we are having so much information lying in hard or electronic copies in different offices and results after so much hard work were not being used to help our stakeholders. Following our stakeholder information need assessment as explained by Sanjay and Krishan earlier, we manage to identify our stakeholders, their info needs, knowledge they were having and wanted to share and the medium they wanted the information to be given to them and the time they wanted it. So we started to compile the information that already existed so that they fit the requirement of our stakeholders. We have gone further to include the stakeholders in coming up with research program, by getting them to identify the areas they want to be addressed and prioritized their needs. We have started to put more emphasis on on-farm trials as requested by the farmers themselves. Hence it is easier to accept the results and apply it to increase their production. Since farmers are also invited to view on farm trials and result presentation in meetings, interaction between different stakeholders has increased and we have noticed that indegenous knowledge are also being shared. There is now information and knowledge sharing in a two way.
To conclude information were not being really shared, but now information which are of use and help in achieving food security are being given to different stakeholders and are being used accordingly. They include, plant protection, nutrient & water management, economic profitability, protected environment to name just a few.
Now the way forward is to put all the information on a website, where, other stakeholders can access the latter and make use of it.
Hi, Nikos from Agro-Know Technologies, working in the context of the VOA3R EU project (http://voa3r.eu) will collecting and exposing research publications and data sets, and in the context of the Natural Europe EU project (www.natural-europe.eu) with biodiversity collections/data.
We are trying to follow the whole process of researchers (working with a viticulture group and a herbarium as initial case studies) and documenting the steps that they follow (lifecycle) as well as the types of information/data that they collect and use. This helps us discover research data that are used in the process but not visible at the final stage (e.g. regular observations of some particular plant, geo/time-tagged photos and notes on the observation) as well as the format in which this information is collected and stored (usually in traditional media like notepads and CDs with photos).
We feel that a real challenge is using very simple media/tools/networks in order to help researchers collect and organise this information, without interfering with their regular processes. And at the back end, we want all this information to be exposed to the rest of the research community (the ideal/magical scenario that Johannes was describing).
Another interesting source of information is scientific but not formal sources such as Web2.0 environments. Scientists' tweet feeds or blogs are often a source of scientific information for non experts or in informal ways - e.g. sharing quickly ideas, material, news around some scientific topic. We are interested into ways to aggregate, filter, and present this information to expert and non-expert audiences.