Question 1: What are we sharing and what needs to be shared?
The landscape of information and data flows and repositories is multifaceted. Peer reviewed journals and scientific conferences are still the basis of scholarly communication, but science blogs and social community platforms become increasingly important. Research data are now increasingly managed using advanced technologies and sharing of raw data has become an important issue.
This topic thread will address and discuss details about the types of information that need to be shared in our domain, e.g.:
Information residing in communications between individuals, such as in blogs and
community platforms supported by sources such as directories of people and
institutions;
Formal scientific data collections as published data sets and their associated
metadata and quality indicators, peer-reviewed scholarly journals or document
repositories;
Knowledge „derivatives‟ such as collections of descriptions of agricultural
technologies, learning object repositories, expertise databases, etc.; And surely more...
There are several interesting examples of successful data exchange between distributed datasets, and some of them in the area of agricultural research and innovation. There are also ambitious attempts that still have to live up to expectations. A common characteristic of most examples is that they are based on specific ad-hoc solutions more than on a general principle or architecture, thus requiring coordination between "tightly coupled" components and limiting the possibilities of re-using the datasets anywhere and of replicating the experiment.
In some areas there are global platforms for sharing and interoperability. Some of these address the need to access scholarly publications, mostly those organized by the publishers, and others address the interfacing of open archives. With regard to standards and services in support of interoperability, there are several very successful initiatives, each dealing with different data domains. Among document repositories, the most successful initiative is surely the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting used by a global network of open archives. The strength of this movement is changing the face of scholarly publishing. Geospatial and remote sensing data have strong communities that have developed a number of wildly successful standards such as OGC that have in turn spurred important open source projects such as GeoServer. Finally, in relation to statistics from surveys, censuses and time-series, there has been considerable global cooperation among international organizations leading to initiatives such as SDMX and DDI, embraced by the World Bank, IMF, UNSD, OECD and others.
Singer System1, GeoNetwork2, and GeneOntology Consortium3 are examples of successful initiatives to create mechanisms for data exchange within scientific communities. The SDMX4 initiative aims to create a global exchange standard for statistical data.
There are more examples, but these advanced systems cannot have a strong impact on the average (smaller, less capacitated) agricultural information systems, because overall there are no easy mechanisms and tools for information systems developers to access, collect and mash up data from distributed sources. An infrastructure of standards, web sevices and tools needs to be created.
1 Singer System http://singer.cgiar.org/ Last accessed March 2011
2 GeoNetwork http://www.fao.org/geonetwork/srv/en/main.home Last accessed March 2011
3 GeneOntology Consortium http://www.geneontology.org/ Last accessed March 2011
4 SDMX http://sdmx.org/ Last accessed March 201
That is a pretty important issue. In my organisation INRA (France), we are looking forward to storing and sharing datasets from our researchers. The aim is for an internal reuse. We have to deal with the fear of sharing datasets to the large community. Scientists are afraid of competition because of assessment. They don't want to share but they want to receive. It is a cultural issue.
Diane
My son who is 15, asked me this serious question some weeks ago: "why do I need to go to school Dad?"
Me: "Hum (embarassed and surprised) ...... why you ask that? Everyone goes to school at your age."
Son: "I can know more things and I can get answers faster using G..gle compared to working with my teacher!"
Me (after few minutes outside to find a good answer): "Yes, but you also have to learn other things like sociabiliy, group-methodology, discipline ... and these things are not evident with G..gle"
Thinking about information retention today, another valid answer I'll give him next time will be: "You know that some people don't share their good ideas and their findings on Internet? So, at some level, you'll have to discover by yourself without any help".
This example shows the real power of actual search engines ... and how next generation will approach life in the near futur.
Two points:
1) CIARD should anticipate, envision new generation's expectations.
2) CIARD should consider in it's framework the open public informations, the hidden informations and the missing, unpublished information.
Hi Mramos,
Yes, indeed the culture of sharing seriously needs to be addressed in order to enhance management and sharing of information in my organization as well. So much information has been created in the Agency but staff are not willing to release information that has been generated from programmes and activities that they have carried out even to be kept in the Library and Documentation Centre. The result is that when information seekers request for information it is difficult to retrieve and access the information. I will also ask the same question "How do we develop a culture of sharing which will indeed enhance information circulation and dissemination?
Agnes
I agree very much with Peters comments. We should not narrow the range of information, that we want to share. We do not talk only about data and only about peer reviewed scholarly articles. With the Web we have an entire new field of blogs and fora, where tacit knowledge becomes explicit. This should be part of our discussion about sharing.
I would like to think that what needs to be shared is what we are sharing - which should be what is needed by the intended audience. Why would we share if what we shrare is not needed. It may also mean why investing and researching when what would be shared is not for the majority. There is a new thinking among the NARS in Papua New Guinea, the country that I come from, in refocusing research agendas so as to deliver on what would be more benefitial to the community. And this is worked through identifcation of case-by-case 'development dormains' using factors such as GIS tools.
So project prioritisation and timely result delivery maybe of paramount for better outputs from limited inputs and that most results should become useful to intended clients such as farmers.
Its very nice topic to be discussed on what we are sharing and what needs to be shared. I am working as senior scientist at ICAR institute in lucknow. Sharing is a new concept in NARS, India. Only during last year, we can see some of the research articles are being shared as few journals have become Open Access. Before them few other journals are in Open Access mode. But only for few journals at higher level, a policy was made to make ICAR journals Open Access. To achieve this, many people who are advocates of OA had put lots of efforts.
Now slowly, establishment of repositories talk had come up. Only four institutes had so far established Institutional Repositories in NARS, India.
When internationally "sharing" for public good is be talked about, we at ICAR level are still not able to talk about it. Now the more emphasis is being on IPR (=Patents).
More sensitization on sharing is need to be advocated in ICAR, SAUs (whole of NARS).
Hello all,
My name is Amots Hetzroni and I work in the institute of agricultural engineering which is part of a government research organization (ARO) in Israel. My major interest is the use of ICT, specifically data management in agriculture.
Recognizing that knowledge and information are key-factors in pest management decision making, we put an effort into establishing a collection, storage and dissemination system for pest scouting data, as part of a decision support system for pest management. We started by developing a data collection system based on pocket-PC’s. The concept was proven to be feasible; and has thus been accepted and used by the pest scouts. Yet, it lacked two-way communication to provide the feedback required in order to support decision making in the field. Therefore, the units were replaced by cellular phones linked to the repository data server.
The interface is rather friendly, and we continually working on minimizing the load on the user. Upon login, local data tables are being updated from the main server, data such as a list of plots and crops pertinent to specific user. The scouting records, including time and location are transferred, upon communication availability, to the server. The repository was designed for internet interface to respond to spatial queries. And interfaces are being developed. Predefined queries and filters, such as history of infestations, are available for the end user from the cellular terminal.
We make efforts to add more players who will use the system: farmers, extension officers, decision making in the region, researchers and more. And we make slow progress.
Some of the difficulties include the maintenance of valid data such as crop schedule and pesticide application, getting some farmers to contribute their data, training players to make use of the system, and more.
We have also created a regional repository for activities in date palm farms, where we linked together the activities and dates’ quality. We intend to use the database as tool to support precision horticulture and for future data mining when searching for quality issues that are associated with the activities, methods and timing. At the moment, the farmers utilize mainly the detailed data on machinery usage and manual labor for economic analysis.
Peter, can you tell more about your stuggle to get datasets? In Wageningen we can rather easily get datasets of supplementary data with articles (publishers charge for that), we are now also working on data from groups that worked on models that combined data from different domains (e.g. farm, climate, crop models) , but we do not really know what to do to get thousands other datasets that are on peoples computers and nobody knows about but themselves.
For the last decades, we have set up centralized systems based on open access publications. As Johannes said, the technology is available now to be able to share data from a cloud organised-systems. What is now expected is to share datasets, raw data. We are now dealing with e-science and not only with publications in an OAI-PMH repository.
As I said above, we have to deal with the fear of sharing datasets. Scientists would like to receive (Johannes's dream ;-) but they don't want to share! Information managers, senior scientists, managers have to advocate with this cultural barrier. The issue of assessment and competition have to be addressed internationally.
If the technology to share is available, storage capacity and maintenance problems may occur. That makes the cloud more relevant.
To end this contribution, I would like to talk about what have to be shared. Not only datasets. What seems to me being important is to add information on how these datasets were produced (including the protocol used). In the case of agriculture, PH of the soil, its composition etc. have to be mentioned with the rawdata to enable the reusability and interpretations.
Therefore,to deposit the datasets could take time for scientits if that kind of information is required. And information managers can't help -as they do for publications - as the researcher is the only one that knows about the protocol used, the PH, composition of the soil...Time consuming is often the argument of the researchers for non-deposition.
Sharing information is not a technical problem but an international cultural one (competition, time for research, assessment).
Diane Le Hénaff, INRA