IAALD-AFITA-WCCA Conference – Session on New Development in Information Systems to Access Agricultural Research Outputs

This session featured presentations on tools for accessing agricultural research and on approaches used by organizations disseminating scientific research and knowledge.

I found the session very interesting, not much because I was presenting a project myself, but rather because other projects and approaches presented there had features that were very much in line with the approach that is behind the Web Ring “framework” that we, as GFAR and as members of the Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research for Development initiative (CIARD), were presenting.All the presentations were interesting, but I’m noting here only a few passages that highlight how different organizations are moving in the same direction as concerns information management, that is towards: a) trying to access external sources as internal databases are not sufficient and/or too difficult and costly to maintain; and therefore looking for information that is easily accessible (exposed in some machine-readable format and possibly queriable); b) trying to make their own contents accessible so that they can be re-used by other information services; c) move towards the use of free online web services and social tools for managing certain types of information and communication.

More in detalis:

Chris Addison presented the DFID R4D portal that gives access to project information and related information on organizations and research outputs. They have an internal database but found that it was not sufficient and also developed mechanisms to look for information on the web. In their turn, they provide a variety of XML outputs (including of course RSS) for their contents to be harvested by other sites. They also use tools like del.icio.us, Slideshare and BlipTV for managing respectively links, presentations and videos.
There are two key messages from this presentation that I think can be used as the two basic guidelines for any website and information system to become really “interoperable”:
“Turn the website into a service“
“Ensure your content is featured“

Luz Marina Alvare presented some examples of adoption of Web 2.0 approaches at IFPRI. An interesting thing is the effort that was required to convince people that the important thing was not “to have everything on the homepage”: staff and researchers were encouraged to manage their pages with blogs and provide feeds for display of the information on the IFPRI website as well as on other websites. Feeds are exploited to provide specific contents to re-use on other websites: IFPRI exposes different feeds for different types of news (news, events, publications, jobs). Social tools like Facebook and linkedIn are used.
An important issue raised is the importance of demonstrating that the success of a “web presence” can be measured against criteria other than the number of visits to the website, criteria like Google searches, Google Scholar searches, searches on the blogosphere, news aggregators etc.

The project that we presented is more a proposal for a common framework for sharing information than a new project on top of the many existing projects for information sharing. This is said before summarizing the presentation because at the end of the session Luz Marina raised the issue that all these initiatives “competing in saying we’ll be better than Google” may confuse the various “actors” that provide and use information on agricultural research for development and this is in fact one of the problems that the Web Ring idea wants to overcome.

The Web Ring is defined as “a voluntary coalition of web spaces that share information related to agricultural research and innovation for development”. These web spaces, since by being part of the network they endorse the principles behind the initiative, take the steps that they can in order to make ARD related information sources more accessible through each other.

The main reason why a framework is needed is ensuring that all partners wishing to share information agree on a common approach and a common direction and commit to follow the agreed approach. The proposed approach is basically a distributed architecture where the partners constitute nodes and gateways that make their contents accessible by using standards (metadata, vocabularies, protocols), re-use contents from the partners and add value to it for their specific audiences. The core values to be endorsed are 1) information should be made truly accessible and re-usable; 2) the information services developed in this framework will be free and publicly available, thus constituting Global Public Goods that can be leveraged by any organization, person or information service.
The Web Ring proposal can be downloaded here and the presentation is available on Slideshare.