Review of Progress and Prospects
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- 1.3 Introductory plenary presentations
1.2 ProcessThe Consultation opened with a series of keynote presentations and general discussion. Participants then divided into two groups, whereby Track 1 addressed institutional issues in “Networks, Capacity Building and Governance”, and Track 2 addressed technical issues in “Standards, Technologies and Protocols”. Each track had working sessions comprising presentations, working groups, and plenary discussions, and the topics considered were: Institutional Networks, Capacity Building, Open Access Publishing, Data Standards, and Alliances. Participants from the two tracks then reconvened to report on and discuss the findings of the working groups and to agree on collaborative actions. 1.3 Introductory plenary presentationsAnton Mangstl welcomed participants to FAO, and framed the meeting around the need to take stock of experiences to date and to movie forward on new initiatives in science and technology information. He noted that a principal challenge facing agricultural organizations involved in science and technology is that although their core competencies are in research and development, there is an imperative to be effective in accessing information and disseminating their outputs. Many opportunities are provided by the new information technologies, but many agricultural organizations are not rising to the challenge adequately. The key constraints that FAO has observed are firstly institutional capacities in the lack of resources and appropriate organizational structures, secondly human capacities in the lack of awareness and skills, and lastly in the networks that offer poor outreach to key audiences. Enhancing institutional capacities will require new organizational structures, new skills and/or new staff, new information content in digital format, and the acquisition of new technologies. Minimising the impact of this change would require that stakeholders learn lessons from others and as far as possible use existing technologies. The Opening Session then continued with keynote presentations by representatives from the five sponsoring organizations. Stephen Rudgard from FAO provided a reprise of the International Information System for the Agricultural Sciences and Technology (AGRIS) initiative and network, established in 1975 and now at its 30th anniversary, that retained the principal objective of improving access and exchange of information on agricultural science and technology. Following the perceived need to re-evaluate AGRIS, a new vision and strategy developed in 2002 with the principles: a decentralized approach; a greater diversity of participating organizations; a strengthened role in capacity building; a focus on full text documents; greater availability of associated information about activities/organizations/people; and a set of web-enabled standards and tools. An electronic conference across the AGRIS network in 2003 had led to a set of 15 recommendations which had been implemented during 2004/05. Strategic partnerships had been developed at international levels, and the Information Management Resource Kit (IMARK) had been developed to address the capacity building requirements. In the area of methodologies and tools, FAO had facilitated the development of the Agricultural Metadata Element Set (AGMES), the AGRIS document Application Profile, the multilingual AGROVOC thesaurus, and the WebAGRIS tools. The key challenges in the AGRIS network remained (i) decentralization, with establishment of national networks based on enabled institutions and sound policies; (ii) capacity building, to support the decentralization; (iii) standards and tools for content management, with wider adoption and use of common approaches; (iv) partnership enhanced at international level. A summary was also provided on the initiative for “Access to Global Online Research on Agriculture” (AGORA), in which many organizations in the eligible countries face the continuing problem of costly and unreliable Internet access, which restricts their ability to use the rich array of content available from almost 800 journals offered by commercial publishers. The Consultative Group (on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) speaker, Enrica Porcari, spoke about the system-wide “ICT-KM” initiative, with the objective of creating “a CGIAR without boundaries, an internationally distributed, unified and open-knowledge organization”. CGIAR staff around the world collaborate on their research using high-capacity computing and communication, and the global public goods created and managed by the CGIAR are safeguarded and made accessible to all stakeholders. The five key areas of the strategy are (i) connectivity, (ii) content, (iii) structure, (iv) coordinating actions and (v) work culture. Early priorities for implementation focused largely on strengthening “infrastructure”. The 14 projects implemented in 2004/05 had also concentrated on system-wide activities within the CGIAR’s 15 Centers aimed at introducing changes in work culture, monitoring and evaluation, use of standards and metadata, and financial savings. The 2006/07 plan would focus largely on science and research content and knowledge sharing and the inclusion of partners, and an online consultation would be used to arrive at a consolidated view of information sources and the need for improved search facilities. There would be linkage opportunities with non-CGIAR partners in: metadata/standards for textual information; data exchange standards; subject vocabularies; capacity building and training; and development of institutional networks. The ICT-KM slogan is “collaborate, create, and communicate”. Ola Smith from GFAR outlined the activities and meetings in 2003-5 focused on information and communication management for agricultural research and development (ICM4ARD). The establishment of a “Global Agenda for Information and Communications Management for Agriculture Research and Development” had been agreed at the GFAR Triennial Meeting in Dakar, out of which had arisen the “GlobAL.RAIS” project conceived as a set of consultations leading to the creation of a vision for a global ARD information system Separate regional consultations culminated in the 1st Inter-Regional Consultation held in June 2004, out of which arose a ICM4ARD Global Partnership Programme (GPP) to support regional and national ARD organizations. The outputs of the GPP were to be (i) strengthening of the advocacy role of the National Agricultural Research System (NARS) leaders, (ii) capacity development of regional and national ICM specialists, and (iii) greater integration of ARD information systems, and (iv) development of appropriate governance structures for global and regional information Systems. A 2nd Inter-Regional Consultation held in May 2005 recommended the establishment of common data standards and formats, the organization of a consultation on the methodology and tools for capacity building and a strategy for action for capacity development for period 2005-2007, and the establishment of an ICM Coordinating Committee at GFAR. Sara Gwynn of INASP described her organization’s work on information access for research and education, library and publishing support, training, and troubleshooting. The major strategic framework through which many of these activities are coordinated is the Programme for Enhancement of Research Information (PERI). Amongst other services, access is provided to developing countries to over 17,000 full-text journals from 42 commercial publishers at much reduced prices, and scientific publishing is supported through the African Journals Online (AJOL) initiative. Three concluding points were made: (i) collaboration is essential to these efforts; (ii) open access provides much valuable scientific information; and (iii) access to commercially published scientific information remains important. Hansjorg Neun, Director of the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA), described the organization’s 20 year history, and the range of activities which now includes links with 8,000 organizations and 34,000 individuals through their many activities such as the “SPORE” magazine, the “ICT Update”, “Agritrade” etc. The key message from CTA’s 2005 evaluation was the need to improve efficiency, and this is leading to a restructuring of the organization. The principal challenges for collaboration were the need to respect partners’ organizational missions, to understand donors’ expectations, and to determine how the separate strategic plans can be enriched while still contributing to the combined plan. Two presentations summarising the key issues then concluded the opening session. Steve Katz from FAO presented the background to the initiative on coherence in agricultural information systems, which had been developed to address the challenge of coping with the huge size and disorganization of the web in the context of distributed information systems such as the AGRIS network. The approach had been to maximize the use of available tools while avoiding duplication, by working with standards, metadata schemes, shared applications, the use of the various controlled vocabularies, and the mapping relations between them. At the same time, coherence had arisen as an issue at the institutional level for FAO, which had taken the approach to work toward developing a layer of shared interoperability between decentralized datasets and value-added information systems. In this context, a review was provided of the AgMES, the documents Application Profile, and a new Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS). In addition, a new website “Agricultural Information Management Standards” was unveiled (http://www.fao.org/aims/) as a collaborative space for accessing metadata standards information and other IT related tools, within which a discussion space had been seen as important for building collaboration. Ajit Maru from GFAR summarized the output of a study coordinated by his organization in 2005 that had assessed the broad range of activities related to institutional networks and capacity building in agricultural scientific and technical information. The study had highlighted the drivers of change as being global competitiveness, an emerging global agricultural technology market, a growing desire to manage institutional intellectual property, interest in public-private-community partnerships in agriculture, and the new ICT tools. The study had concluded that the basic requirement was for strong national and sub-national information systems, with fully distributed models of information management in order to maximize ownership, and flexibility that was based on web-enabled systems that were able to support multilingual content. The requirement for stronger institutional mechanisms was identified for supporting collaboration, infrastructure development, and the development of tools and standards. Points raised during the discussion session that followed the above presentations highlighted the need to look at information and knowledge exchange in terms of social issues and the role of intermediaries in expanding to a broader range of clients such as rural communities and policymakers. However, the demand for change and the market have to be quantified so that products, services and messages are accessible in cost as well as content, and that they are sustainable from the supply-side. 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