Ajit Maru

Developing Agricultural Research Information Systems: The experience of the Global Forum on Agricultural Research

The Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR) is a platform at the global level for dialogue and action of all stakeholders of agricultural research and innovation for development (ARD). Improving sharing and exchange of information that contributes to agricultural research for development is one of the primary actions of GFAR. This paper will describe GFAR’s experiences in fostering and supporting the development agricultural research information systems at national, regional and global levels, illustrating the evolution of the overall approach, the initiatives of the various stakeholders and the experiences with different technologies. A description of the evolution of the approach in building agricultural information systems and an overview of the major services implemented over the last decades and their technological features will demonstrate that creating integrated information services giving access and adding value to information that is electronically available, especially through semantics, remains a major challenge. In order for this to be achieved, the existing sources of information must become really interoperable and allow for easy automatic retrieval of information, and work on mapping between vocabularies or advanced natural language processing must be done for improving the semantic accessibility of information.

Setting up a Global Linked Data Catalog of Datasets for Agriculture

The movement to share data has been on the rise in the last decade and lately in the agricultural domain. Similarly platforms for publishing scientific and statistical datasets have sprouted and have improved visibility and availability of datasets. Yet there are still constraints in making datasets discoverable and re-usable. Commonly agreed semantics, authority lists to index datasets and standard formats and protocols to expose data are now essential. This paper explains how the CIARD RING provides a global linked data catalog of datasets for agriculture. The first part of this paper will describe the Linked Data layer of the CIARD RING focusing on the data model, semantics used and the CIARD RING LOD publication. The second part will provide examples of re-use of data from the RING. The paper concludes by describing the future steps in the development of the CIARD RING.

A Conceptual Framework for Studying Linkages in an Agriculture-Health-Environment System

The agriculture-health-environment system (AHES) is a system that counteracts health problems in a community, such as malaria, whose causes are multi-factorial, emerging from the interaction of agriculture and environment, and whose solutions are through cross-sector cooperation of organizations, such as hospitals, community clinics, and irrigation departments that respond to counteract it. The systems overall objective is to improve the health, social, and economic wellbeing of the target community. The AHES is characterized by a set of organizations that have complex linkages between them. These linkages enable agriculture, health, and environment organizations to generate, disseminate and use data, information, knowledge, and draw resources to counteract a community problem. By defining the linkages, learning about the problem and its solutions across organizations can be hastened giving impetus to the process of change in organizations and in the system. This study introduces a conceptual framework developed using a systems methodology to define the AHES, its component organizations, and their linkages. It then illustrates the application of the conceptual framework to describe a model AHES in the context of its organizational linkages for malaria control.