The current phase of the FAO CountrySTAT project is focused on Sub-Saharan Africa. During a recent conference where we met with our 17 partners to discuss phase 2 strategies, it became very clear that in terms of integrating ICT within institutions the non-functional requirements were the most important requirements to meet in terms of project success. Issues of connectivity, usability, portability, affordability, deployability, etc. are much more important than the exact function set. If these basic issues aren't addressed you may get off the ground but you will crash before long. Having said that, it's also clear that the most intractable problems are typically institutional. Champions are needed. Getting people to work together, cooperate, share information can be incredibly difficult. Our project has a strong focus on institutional issues and we spend a lot of effort supporting transversal working groups across institutions and ministries to get people working together. It's the only way to have some chance of longevity. Finally, methodological support and training on the use of standards is also vital if the work is to have broader impact. Often at the national level the consistent use of international standards may not be seen to be of fundamental importance, whereas when working at the regional and international level we see that lack of standardization can create insurmountable problems when trying to compare and harmonize data.

Dear all, My name is Yves Jaques and I work at FAO in Rome for the Statistics department CountrySTAT project where I am the information systems manager. CountrySTAT is a framework for international cooperation on agricultural statistics. Through the distribution of standards, methods and tools backed by regular training sessions it fosters the adoption of best practices for statistical dissemination. Combined with its support for the formation of transversal committees and working groups at the national level it seeks to bridge the space between national institutions, ushering in greater harmonisation and wider use of shared statistical standards in the agricultural sector.

D4Science is an EC-funded project that begins in January 2008 and brings together cutting-edge research in grid-technology and scientific communities to build the next generation of on-demand virtual research environments. From the fisheries community, both FAO-FI and World Fish Center will be participating. The project builds upon succesful technology already developed for the digital libraries project: [url]http://www.diligentproject.org/[/url]

[url]http://www.neon-project.org[/url] is an EC-funded project to create an open-source ontology lifecycle toolkit. FAO-FI participates as a case study in which we are developing both a set of ontologies for various classification systems, and an application that uses a combination of databases and ontologies to give users access to multiple data sources through a single semantic interface. The first ontologies can currently be downloaded here: h[url]ttp://www.fao.org/aims/neon.jsp[/url][/url]

[url]http://firms.fao.org[/url] is a partnership of 16 regional fishery bodies with a goal of publishing harmonised reports on fishery resources with global coverage.