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Representative of FAO in the APARIS meeting in Bangkok, October 2002

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Conference AFITA 2002 (Asean Federation on Information Technology in Agriculture), Beijing October 2002

Key Note Speaker on the Agricultural Ontology Service Initiative

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A comprehensive Framework for Building Multilingual Domain Ontologies: Creating a Prototype Biosecurity Ontology

Boris Lauser, Tanja Wildemann, Allison Poulos, Frehiwot Fisseha, Johannes Keizer, Stephen Katz

CGIAR Conference on Knowledge Management, Washington March 2001

Presentation: Role of Meta Data Standards for Information Management on the Web

Creating the Semantic Web: the Role of an Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS)

Frehiwot Fisseha, Kat Hagedorn, Johannes Keizer, and Stephen Katz, SPSS workshop Stanford
http://www.semanticweb.org/SWWS/program/position/soi-fisseha.pdf

Plenary Presentation at the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, October 2001

The AGStandards Metadata initiative at the International Conference on
Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 2001 , Tokyo

One of the most important goal in my new job was to bring the most importan work areas online, what was all achieved in 2000.

FAO online catalogue

The FAO documentation database has been published on the web with numerous links to the full text in the FAO document repository

AGROVOC

The multilingual thesaurus AGROVOC has been published on the web, making it first time available for a broader public.

The AGRIS/CARIS Information Centre

The AGRIS/CARIS Information Centre is the portal for the AGRIS/CARIS network with access to the databases and other important information about scientific and technical material in the field of agriculture.

Publishing the Database on the Web made the AGRIS data free available for FAO member countries.

The central AGRIS database had been produced in Vienna during the 90s by a group for more than 15 persons, who processed the incoming data before adding them to the database.
After the decision of taking away emphasis from data processing to capacity building, the AGRIS production was transferred to Rome. Part of the money saved by this operation was used to create positions in the field to support the capacity building fucntions. The challenge was, to go on with the production of the AGRIS database in Rome with incomparable less resources.

I August 2000 I was hired by the FAO and became an employee of the United Nations System.
I was assigned the responsibility of the "AGRIS/CARIS and Documentation Group". This was the begin of an adventure, which is furtheron documented in this Blog.