At the end of April I participated in the World Meeting of IAALD, The International Association of Agricultural Information Specialists. About 200 colleagues from overall of the World participated.

Yesterday I represented FAO in the final review of the D4Science project (http://www.d4science.eu) here in Brussels.

D4Science is a project to build Virtual Research Infrastructures, in which scientist can collaborate despite of different locations or disciplines.

Since August 2000 Johannes Keizer is working for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN . He is heading an information and knowledge management group of 20 professionalss. The main responsibilities of his group are:

• Knowledge exchange infrastructures in international Agricultural Science and Technology
• Documentation of FAOs technical knowledge production, maintaining the FAO openArchive
• FAO Open Archive Services for Agricultural Science and Technogloy
• Maintenance and Promotion of Global Standards in Agricultural Information and Knowledge Management (Agricultural Ontology Service)
• Cutting Edge Applications using Semantic Technologies
• Lead FAOs participation in Research Projects of the European Commission (FP6/FP7)

Main Websites

• The Agricultural Information and Knowledge Mangement Standards Website
• The FAO OpenArchive on Technical Publications
• The AGRIS OpenArchive Services
• The Website of the AGRIS network

FP6/FP7 Projects

• NeON (Ontology Lifecycle Management)
• D4Science

Citations

• Google
• Wikipedia

From November 6-8 I participated in the 5th International Conference on Universal Digital Library. (Pittsburgh, USA ICUDL -

ICUDL is a worldwide initiative with strong operations in China and India to digitize library content and to make it online available.

The picture shows Prof. Jaime Carbonell giving his presentation on the state of art in machine translation

The presentation that I gave at the meeting is attached.

Wednesday, 28. I am meeting Mimos Management at their Headquarter in the Kuala Lumpur Science Park. MIMOS is an incredible place, great personalities from top management to the researchers, I met researchers not only from Malaysia, but also from Germany (partnership with DFKI) and Iran. I was told that years ago, MIMOS was changed dramatically to get rid of hierarchies and red tape.

Monday, 26, I met Dr. Wang Zhong's team at the School of Information Science, Sun Ya Tsen University. We had first a tour through the "Higher Education Mega Center", which is on an Island between rivers and his home to 10 universities. I was again amazed about the enormous investment of China into higher education,

johannes keizer with Dr. Wang's team, missing Dr. Wang :-)

Today I finished my visit to Hefei with a working lunch with Director Wang, Prof Qian, Dr. Wang Zhong and other colleagues from the future lab of the Chinese Agricultural Ontology Service.

first row from left: Director Wang, Dr. Keizer, Prof. Qian
second row from left: Dr. Wang Zhong, Guangzhou and co-worker of IIM, Hefei

I got today my letter of engagement for two years as visting professor at the Institute of Intelligent Machines of the Chinese Academy of Science (IIM, CAS). Professor Rujing Wang, Deputy Director of the Institute is very keen to intensify the contacts with our team at FAO in Rome.

Johannes Keizer at his presentation for staff of IIM, CAS

Today I had my presentation at the Chinese Agricultural Ontology Workshop. The workshop started yesterday, but I did not participate as the workshop language was Chinese :-). This was calculated and I was lucky enough to have the entire day to finally compose my presentations

Impact is also if others use the tools, our team is developing, without that we know about it :-). The below picture is from a presentation by the team of CAAS in the Chinese Agricultural Ontology workshop.

The idea behind this is the same as behind our multilingual semantic search assistant. It exploits the structured knowledge of the thesaurus against an unstructured corpus like Google. The work was the product of a PhD thesis and is unfortunately still not published.