Valeria Pesce
| Organization | Global Forum on Agricultural Research and Innovation (GFAR) |
|---|---|
| Organization type | International Organization |
| Organization role |
Partnerships facilitator & digital innovation adviser
|
| Country | Italy |
| Area of Expertise |
data sharing, data policies and rights, digital agriculture, information management, open data, data science
|
I am currently project manager and convener at the Secretariat of the Global Forum on Agricultural Research and Innovation (GFAR) and data scientist at FAO, and I collaborate with the Secretariat of the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition initiative (GODAN). I have represented FAO and GFAR in EC-funded projects on data infrastructures (agINFRA, Big Data Europe) and I manage the CIARD RING, AgriProfiles and Agrisemantics Map open data platforms in coordination with other global and regional actors. More recently, I have dedicated a good part of my time to the planning and convening of workshops and webinars on the issue of farmers' data rights.
This member participated in the following Forums
Forum E-consultation on ethical, legal and policy aspects of data sharing affecting farmers
Day 1: Major challenges from a policy legal and ethical perspective, preventing smallholder farmers benefiting from data sharing
[Attempt at a translation.]
The lack of consistent laws and policies both on access to data and sharing of data on the part of small and medium African producers, before and after independence, is a serious problem for agricultural development in this region.
In fact, studies on production models and strategies in the African environment, before and even after colonization, often haven't considered copyright nor intellectual property. For this reason, many African models have been improved elsewhere, without the creators of such techniques and innovations being rewarded for their innovation in Africa.
Nowadays, it's a matter of sharing African data and innovation in the same way as big organizations share all innovation data on the market, taking into consideration their rights and other benefits. Structures like FAO and many others could facilitate African countries through consolidated regulation and policies in the domain of data sharing.
I have some concrete examples regarding bio-fertilizers, the moringa, snail and crab breeding, and many others, demonstrating that the lack of regulations and policies hasn't allowed for a smooth development in Africa.
I agree with Hugo that the word "open" in the title of the e-discussion may be misleading.
Indeed the first paper Hugo mentions was not just about open data, but rather data sharing, and how open it can or should be in order not to harm the farmer.
The reason for the e-consultation title is that we started from the GODAN principle that open data is good and the discussion was on why, even if we agree it's a good thing, it is not benefiting smallholder farmers and how laws and policies could improve the situation. But indeed if we start discussing laws and policies it means we're considering that in certain cases data may better be not fully open.
So I would agree to change "aspects of open data" into "aspects of data sharing" in the title of the e-consultation and "benefiting from open data" into "benefiting from data sharing" in this day 1 question.
I'll do it and if someone disegrees I'm ready to revert the decision :-)
And my answer to Hugo's question would definitely be yes, the type of data you mention in the second part of your comment are part of this discussion.
Forum Forum: "Challenges and Opportunities for Capturing Impact in ICT initiatives in Agriculture" September, 2011
Resources and references for this forum
[On behalf of Ehud Gelb]
In December 2009 the "International Consultation on Agricultural Research for Development and Innovation: Addressing emerging challenges and exploiting opportunities through Information and Communication Technologies" was held at ICRISAT in Patancheru (Hyderabad, India).
One of the topics covered by the consultation was the evaluation of the impact of ICT adoption in agriculture.
The final report of the event is available here: http://www.fao.org/docs/eims/upload/276320/ICT%20Hyderabad%20Workshop%20Paper.pdf
Forum Forum: "Building the CIARD Framework for Data and Information Sharing" April, 2011
Question 4: What actions should now be facilitated by the CIARD Task Forces?
And still on the issue of enabling Institutions to better share information, since CIARD planned to start a "Capacity Development" Task Force since the beginning: do you see capacity development as an important activity under CIARD? And how should this work?
Regarding points 2 (Extensively using shared vocabularies and frameworks) and 3 (Creating document repositories using existing data exchange protocols such as OAIPMH) listed in the introductory post, these can be immediate actions for Institutions that have the capacities and tools to do it. But I personally think one of the biggest efforts under CIARD should be that of identifying material and tools that can enable Institutions to do this.
The Pathways are already a useful resource (which should be enlarged), and in the RING portal there is a plan to host more and more in-depth technical tutorials (a step further from the Pathways, which are more synthetic) on how to achieve interoperability. Also the AIMS portal contains a lot of essential information on standards, tools and services.
And one of the key points in my opinion is still what Hugo said in another post in thread n.3: standards will not be accepted if there are no tools that handle them. I'm convinced that at least a working group in CIARD (the CIARD Content Management Task Force?) should look at the issue of tools and provide guidelines, functional and non-functional requirements, and possibly also a registry / directory of tools that assesses tools against these requirements.
Question 3: What are the emerging tools, standards and infrastructures?
I think what Hugo is saying here is very interesting and gives a good answer to Sanjay's concerns, which have been often expressed also by other colleagues when talking about giving advice also on which tools to use for better information sharing.
In particular, when Hugo says that the list of "features" _may_ not be enough ("it helped settingup a shopping list but gave no information about brands and addresses of shops"), I think he is raising a point that is very important when you think of the decision making process: if you give a list of features to a technical person, this person may be able to evaluate several tools and identify those that have the necessary features, but managers who don't have technical staff or time to conduct this evaluation may just want to know which tools have the necessary features ("brands and addresses of shops") and they might look for a source of such information that has some consensus and "authority", and maybe CIARD at this point could represent that consensus, but this will happen only if the community sharing their experiences with tools is large enough and if there is some agreement on which "features" are most relevant for which needs.
And one personal and questionable (and it will be questioned I'm sure) opinion on being completely tool-agnostic: the fact is that there _are_ differences between tools, and being too neutral can also be damaging. There are tools that have proven more suitable to information management and integration of standards than others, and more sustainable.
And tools aren't just "technology", they are the instrument through which you implement the standards and in the end you make your information accessible.
I would start with a short list of some interesting recent developments (in terms of tools, standards and infrastructures) that can help achieve better interoperability of information in agriculture going in the direction of Linked Open Data (LOD).
1) The publication of "authority data" that are relevant to the agricultural sector (and here I include subject vocabularies, KOS, authority lists of special entities like journals or authors, geographic entities...) as Linked Open Data. An example is Agrovoc. Also the geopolitical ontology is ready to be published as LOD. And an authority list of journals on agriculture has been published by FAO.
2) The mapping of some of these authority data between each other (e.g. Agrovoc to NALT, and several geographic encoding standards mapped in the geopolitical ontology)
3) Software tools (document management systems, content management systems, blogging platforms etc.) going towards LOD.
In the AgriDrupal community, we are experimenting with the Drupal CMS and its RDF features. Drupal can expose all contents as a triple store, mapping all data in the system to classes and properties from any namespace (also through a SPARQL engine) and consume Linked Data by importing RDF records both from files and from SPARQL queries.
4) A very recent development: the preparation of some "recommendations" for publishing bibliographic records as LOD: this is interesting because it goes beyond the concept of a rigid RDF schema and proposes several options for each RDF property, taken from vocabularies such as Dublin Core, Bibo and AgMES, giving options both for literal values and for URIs and different options depending on the granularity of description desired. These recommendations should be published at the end of April.
Similar things could be done for other information types.
5) A portal keeping track of all the information services / sources exploiting these standards and tools: the CIARD RING.
Introduction, Objectives, Background Note for Discussion and Summary of Week 1
- eScienceNews automatically aggregates and semantically annotates contents from the web
Question 2: What are the prospects for interoperability in the future?
Just a hint to still another "prospect", which maybe will be better covered in the next thread on latest developments.
It is good to agree on LOD as the future of interopeability, but what are we going to say to Institutions that are supposed to produce and consume LOD and don't have tools that allow them to do it?
It is true that software tools are clearly moving towards LOD, but we have keep monitoring developments in this field in order to be able to recommend tools that are not only capable of producing LOD (and therefore create a triple store of all contents managed in the system) but also flexible enough to allow to customize the classes and properties used in the triple store.
More perhaps in the next thread.
It seems we all agree that Linked Data is the way to go. So the framework is set. But within this framework the issue of defining a minimum set of data that allow to interoperate information of a certain type by other systems is still open.
It is not so much an issue of which description vocabularies (Dublin Core, FOAF, MODS, AgMES, Darwin Core, geoRSS...) to use, since this can be tackled by mapping vocabularies and using stylesheets - although the LOD recommendation is always to use widely adopted vocabularies - but it is more an issue of which data should be included in an information object so that it is fully interoperable.
For instance, if we are exchanging data about events, is it enough to use the basic RSS metadata set? RSS 1.0 is RDF, can use URIs and can be LOD-compliant, but if we don't include information on the dates and the location of the event in specific RDF properties, is an RSS feed of events fully interoperable?
An example of a service that aggregates events from different sources is AgriFeeds. The added-value service that Agrifeeds offers in aggregating events is that users can browse events chronologically in a calendar and geographically by region and country. A feed of events that doesn't have properties for the start and end date of the event and for the location, is not interoperable by AgriFeeds. In fact, it is not discarded but it is treated as a basic news feed, without the possibility to exploit the advanced chronological and geographical browse.
Another similar issue is subject indexing. Since none of the sources aggregated by AgriFeeds uses Agrovoc or other subject lists mapped to Agrovoc to tag news and events, no coherent subject browsing is possible.
In this sense, defining the actual data (or the metadata set, in traditional terms) that are recommended for each information type is more important than agreeing on a specific standard in terms of DTD or RDF schema (the "description vocabulary"). Vocabulary issues can be solved from a technical point of view, but if the data we need are not there "interoperation" and therefore re-use of information may not be possible.