I am participating at the moment in the conference titled above. The openig keynote from Bruce Perens was very interesting in discussing the economic importance of openSource software. He pointed out that no software development that is crucial for the business success of a company will be open, he called that differentiating technology, but that, in the moment a software goes on sale, is not differentiating any more. In these cases the openSource model shows to be more powerful.

On October 29 and 30 the Workshop on the European Information Space was hosted in FAO and co-organized by my team. The workshop brought together projects from two different directorates of the DG Information Society and Media. It was organized by the DILIGENT (Digital Library Infrastructure on Grid Enabled Technology). Donatella Castelli from the CNR in Pisa, the DILIGENT coordinator succeeded in bringing together numerous projects funded by the EU in the area of Digital libraries and in the area of Research Infrastructure-

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.

I am at the moment participating in the Agricultural Working Group of the Asean Pacific Advanced Network (APAN- http://www.apan.net).

I am at the moment in Singapore at the DC2007 meeting. I delivered a keynote in the first session after the introduction by Dr Vivian Balakrishnan, Singapore's Minister for Community Development, Youth & Sports and Second Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts.

Dear Participants,

The two months of the E-Conference have come to a fruitful end. This was an extremely valuable opportunity for the whole AGROVOC Team to understand the requirements and needs of the community as evidenced from the extremely useful discussions we have had in each phase of the conference.

During the Phase 1 of the e-conference participants were asked to introduce themselves via a questionnaire. Out of thus far registered 170 participants,
101 sent in their introductions. This was done using a short questionnaire.

From June 13-16 I visited Mann Library at Cornell University in Ithaca to speak about common projects.
Following an invitation of the Metadata Working Group, (http://metadata-wg.mannlib.cornell.edu/forum/) I gave a talk on the "AOS - Initiative". My presentation is attached.

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.