Are you aware of any platform that can be seen as exemplars?

Thanks

Yes, it is good to distinguish different aspects of capacity development. In discussions of the Content Management Task Force some years ago it appeared that all participants - including those commonly considered as technical 'wizards' -  indicated that most of what they did is capacity development. Developing applicationsand solving technicalo issues takes less time than explaining things and getting people to work with applications. I assume you mean that sort of cpacity building with "field 1". I agree that field 2 (in my words repackiging information in forms approporiate for communication with different audiences) should get more attention. In my view there is a third field: developing institutional readiness, getting thins organised. 

The five-star is  a very useful way to explain the various to open up data, "the stuff". Most of CIARD's  actions up till now do not concern "the stuff" itself, but the metadata that describes the stuff and makes it possible to discover "the stuff". If this is a new stage for CIARD, dealing with the stuff itself rather than its discovery and accssibility, this should be communicated in a clear way. Are all  stakeholders for this new phase on board?

I was quite intrigued by your  post , San_Jay, and some on this forum (at least Valeria, Johannes) know why. This post addresses the question at what level CIARD should be involved with tools, their selection, support and development.
I can see a  number of levels:
- List the features that certain tools should have to share your information with the rest of the world, as CIARD is advocating. It should for example be harvestable with the OAI-PMH protocol or produce sitemap files for indexing in search engines. This to me seems to be what you are advocating. One of the iterations of the "tools piece" that we are struggling with did exactly that. We were not sure  whether this was helpful enough for all: it helped setting up a shopping list but gave no information about brands and addresses of shops.
- A next iteration under development now attempts to list tools that have a number of these desired features. Such a list should come with more relevant faetures ranging from hard technical issues (operating system) to more soft issues (skill level required to run it) This approach will only be succesfull of the CIARD commmunity as a whole is willing to share it's experience to maintain all this.
- A next level of involvement coud be assembling a package or toolkit that fulfills the neds of most of the community. A sort of filled shopping bag with what many of us need anyway. FAO has assembled Agridrupal to support a number of partners. FAO contributes it as an option to the CIARD community but other CIARD partners follow different lines. Do we expect this level of support from CIARD?

I think it comes back to the question of standards. We can only achieve all the things we want if we follow certain standards.  As Johannes said standards are not set but accepted. Standards will not be accepted if there are no tools that handle them. For example: XML and XSLT would not have been accepted if Michael Kay would not have developed the Saxon processor, to get people started. Do we need such seminal technoogies for the standards that we are tring to get accepted?

I suggest we use question 4 of this discussion to discuss how CIARD should proceed with all this.

Well, I have tried to do some of what you propose: explain to a wider audience why we get excited about LOD. In a general introcution for  information committees within our science groups here I had included it  in a general intro on data repositories and data curation. I could as well have spoken about Paracelsus' prognostications, and I have skipped it for later presentations.

I guess that people will understand it when they see a result. And it should be something that really could not have been done in another way. Just pulling in additional information from other sources  is not good enough, people are used to web 2.0 mashups.

Krishan wrote:

>When Hugo, in response to Qu. 1, states that he did not see the collaboration among >people to define or discover new uses of information, was he looking for tools that >facilitate interoperability around concepts?

Krishan, I am not sure what you are referring to. If you mean my example of bringing together different types of data relating to climate and agriculture: I meant to say exactly the opposite. What I hinted at is that bringing these  things together is not just a technical or logical issue. There is a human side to it as well.  But it needs to be done, especially for more insight in urgent problems like agriculture and climate change. Not necessarily easy, but like - just a random  example :=)  - in a marriage, it is worth the effort to learn to talk to each other.