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.

From September 6-7 ICRISAT in Hyderabad hosted a workshop on OpenAccess publishing in Indian Agriculture. I was invited as a speaker. My presentation is attached. There are many open Archives in India, but no up to now in Agricultural research.

I am participating today in a meeting of the stakeholders in the Initiative for International Information Systems in Agricultural Science and Technology.

From October 16-17 my group co-organized and hostend the DSpace Usergroup meeting 2007. (http://www.aepic.it/conf/index.php?cf=11) My colleague Imma Subirats was one of the pillars of the entire organization. I got quite excited about DSpace and the possibilities to adapt it to Agricultural Open Archives.
I was also intrigued by the connections between DSpace and the MIT Simile project that brings a "semantic dimension" into the DSpace development.
http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=1660131278&size=m

During the e-agriculture week at FAO Headquarter, I participated in a CGIAR workshop on "opening Access to Agricultural research. I think there is big confusion among various stakeholders about the linkings between research, technology deployment and Extension. It seems to me that there is a tendency to apply criteria, which have value for extension and technology deployment (relating to the end users i.e) also on research. I still think that research should be as much as possible independent from application szenario, but should resolve scientific problems.

September 23 and 24I took part in the organization of the second expert consultation on Information Systems in Agricultural Science and Technology was hold in Rome at FAO HQ.
A very interesting part of the conference were country reports from (among others) Egypt, Peru, Madagascar and Thailand.

From June 11-13 I participated in the meeting of the GFIS Implementation group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, USA. GFIS is the Global Forestry Information Service (http://www.gfis.net), a partnership operation of IUFRO, CIFOR (CGIAR), NBII (US-Gov), FAO and other partners.

From February 20 -23 I participated in the ICSD in Bangalore, organized by ARD Prasad from the Documentation, Research and Training Center of the Indian Statistical Institute in Bangalore. My group presented the Ontology based electronic FNA journal and the proposal for an AGRIS OAI architecture. I was furthermore Theme Speaker in the session on "Institutional Repositories and Case Studies" and participated in the concluding Panel discusion on "Semantic Web and Digital Libraries:Research & collaborations".

I was invited to deliver a keynote at the Central Europe Conference of the eFarmer project (eFarmer Central European Conference 2007). The title of my presentation is "Knowledge Exchange Infrastructure for Agricultural Research and Technology" (see attached file). The eFarmer project has been granted by the EC in the context of the eContent Program.

Brussels 2006-12-13,14

I travelled to Brussels for discussions with EU project Officers and to participate in the Europe-Africa Concertation Meeting