EDI - XML Standards and Technologies in the Agri-Food Industry

Due to globalisation, the new technological developments and the complexity of food supply processes, the European food sector is increasingly becoming more complex. The consumers’ trust in food, triggered and affected by a number of food crises, is low. Today, consumers increasingly expect safe and high quality food and demand information about the origin of their food. Also, the economic health of the food industry can be greatly affected by food crises; therefore, efficient and effective mechanisms are required to assist the food industry in tracking and tracing products along the food chain. In this paper, we discuss the criteria for an efficient and effective traceability system from an IT perspective (mainly data exchange) and we identify key requirements for ICT enabled traceability

The Economics of Traceability for Multi-Ingredient Products: A Network Approach

The consumption of multi-ingredient foods is increasing across the globe as consumers spend less time preparing meals. Traceability is now extensively used to reduce information imperfections in food markets and recent EU law suggests it will be implemented for manufactured meals as well. We present a model developed to understand how information on different ingredients flows through supply chains for multi-ingredient food products. The network model has three tiers linked by contracts for levels of quality and information. The model is useful for analyzing tradeoffs and network effects emerging in the choice of traceability levels.Traceability, multi-ingredient foods, network models, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Project Management Learning in a Collaborative Distant Learning Context - An Actual On-going Experience

The goal of this paper is to show the results of an on-going experience on teaching project management to grade students by following a development scheme of management related competencies on an individual basis. In order to achieve that goal, the students are organized in teams that must solve a problem and manage the development of a feasible solution to satisfy the needs of a client. The innovative component advocated in this paper is the formal introduction of negotiating and virtual team management aspects, as different teams from different universities at different locations and comprising students with different backgrounds must collaborate and compete amongst them. The different learning aspects are identified and the improvement levels are reflected in a rubric that has been designed ad hoc for this experience. Finally, the effort frameworks for the student and instructor have been established according to the requirements of the Bologna paradigms. This experience is developed through a software-based support system allowing blended learning for the theoretical and individual?s work aspects, blogs, wikis, etc., as well as project management tools based on WWW that allow the monitoring of not only the expected deliverables and the achievement of the goals but also the progress made on learning as established in the defined rubri

Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) Fishing: A Whitepaper

Illegal, unregulated and unreported (IUU) fishing refers to fishing activities that do not comply with regional, national, or international fisheries conservation or management measures. This whitepaper characterizes the status of Illegal, unregulated, and unreported fishing, the philanthropic community's current efforts to help reduce it, and potential opportunities for the Packard Foundation to become more actively engaged. The paper was drafted between March and June 2015, following a combination of desk research and a handful of select interviews

RuleCNL: A Controlled Natural Language for Business Rule Specifications

Business rules represent the primary means by which companies define their business, perform their actions in order to reach their objectives. Thus, they need to be expressed unambiguously to avoid inconsistencies between business stakeholders and formally in order to be machine-processed. A promising solution is the use of a controlled natural language (CNL) which is a good mediator between natural and formal languages. This paper presents RuleCNL, which is a CNL for defining business rules. Its core feature is the alignment of the business rule definition with the business vocabulary which ensures traceability and consistency with the business domain. The RuleCNL tool provides editors that assist end-users in the writing process and automatic mappings into the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) standard. SBVR is grounded in first order logic and includes constructs called semantic formulations that structure the meaning of rules.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, Fourth Workshop on Controlled Natural Language (CNL 2014) Proceeding

The use of computers for graduate education in Project Management. Improving the integration to the industry.

This paper presents an initiative for monitoring the competence acquisition by a team of students with different backgrounds facing the experience of being working by projects and in a project. These students are graduated bachelor engineering are inexperienced in the project management field and they play this course on a time-shared manner along with other activities. The goal of this experience is to increase the competence levels acquired by using an structured web based portfolio tool helping to reinforce how relevant different project management approaches can result for final products and how important it becomes to maintain the integration along the project. Monitoring is carried out by means of have a look on how the work is being done and measuring different technical parameters per participant. The use of this information could make possible to bring additional information to the students involved in terms of their individual competencies and the identification of new opportunities of personal improvement. These capabilities are strongly requested by companies in their daily work as well as they can be very convenient too for students when they try to organize their PhD work

Carting Away the Oceans 8

Greenpeace released the 8th edition of its annual report, Carting Away the Oceans, which evaluates 26 major retailers on their seafood sourcing and sustainability. Whole foods and Safeway topped the ranking guide. Four supermarkets -- Roundy's, Bi-Lo, Save Mart and Publix -- failed altogether. Kroger, the fifth biggest food retailer in the world, is exposed for selling the most Red List species of any U.S. grocery chain, for the third consecutive year."Consumers want to be able to walk into their local grocery store and know that all the options are sustainable," said James Mitchell, Greenpeace Senior Oceans Campaigner. "That's why Greenpeace is pushing companies like Bi-Lo, Save Mart and Roundy's to drastically improve their sourcing, so that making the right decision is easy for their customers."Hy-Vee was evaluated for the first time and immediately entered the top five best performing retailers for sustainable seafood sourcing.Four of the top five supermarkets have, or will shortly launch private label (store brand) sustainable canned tuna products. Consumers will now be able to find sustainable and affordable alternatives to destructively-caught tuna at Whole Foods, Safeway, Trader Joe's, Hy-Vee, and Walmart. The report gives further credit to Whole Foods and Trader Joe's for not stocking Bumblebee, Chicken of the Sea or StarKist's tuna, which are caught using destructive fishing methods."When Greenpeace started ranking America's retailers on seafood sustainability in 2008, every company failed. We've seen huge improvements since then, yet grocery giants like Kroger are still stocking too many threatened Red List species, which are often caught using highly destructive fishing methods." said Mitchell.Despite progress made by the retail sector overall, overfishing, destructive fishing, and illegal fishing are still major problems for ocean conservation and the economies of developing countries.  Populations of the ocean's top predators like sharks, tuna, and swordfish have dropped by as much as 90% over the past half-century.  Bycatch - where species like sharks and turtles are caught unintentionally in the process of fishing, then thrown back into the sea dead or dying - threatens marine ecosystems as well as global food security.