Could global norms enable definition of sustainable farming systems in a transformative international trade system?

This paper aims to support differentiation between sustainable and unsustainable agricultural production, with a view to enabling a transformative agricultural trade system by incentivizing sustainable agricultural production. We argue that transformative governance of corresponding global trade flows will need to provide support to the weaker participants in production systems, above all small-scale farmers in the global South, in order to support their food security and a path out of poverty as well as global environmental goals. The present article seeks to provide an overview of internationally agreed norms that can serve as basis for differentiation between sustainable and unsustainable agricultural systems. Such common objectives and benchmarks could then be used in multilateral and binational trade agreements. We propose a list of objectives, criteria, and benchmarks that could contribute to formulation of new trade agreements that strengthen producers who are currently marginalized in international trade flows. While acknowledging that sustainability cannot be easily measured and defined for all site-specific conditions, we posit that it is nevertheless possible to identify such common objectives and benchmarks, based on internationally agreed norms

Benchmarking the RDF(S) interoperability of ontology tools

The number of ontology tools, such as ontology editors and repositories, is constantly rising. Ideally, one could use them all seamlessly and thus benefit from all the functionalities they offer. As shown in previous EON workshops, interoperability among different development tools is not straightforward since ontology editors rely on specific internal knowledge models which are translated into common formats such as RDF(S). This paper addresses the urgent need for interoperability by providing an exhaustive set of RDF(S) benchmarks and demonstrating in an extensive field study the state-of-the-art of interoperability among six ontology tools. From the field study we have compiled a comprehensive set of best practices which may serve as guidelines. Tool developers benefit from having guidelines to design their import and export functionalities and a concrete set of benchmarks against which they can evaluate their import and export functionalities. Ontology engineers benefit from our work by having an overview to which extend interoperability is ensured for combinations of specific tools

Nebraska Legislative Planning Database 2011-2012

The Nebraska Legislature\u27s Planning Committee was created in 2009 with the passage of LB 653, in order to help establish a process of long-term state planning with the Nebraska Legislature. The committee was created to assist state government in identifying emerging trends, assets, and challenges of the state and the long-term implications of the decisions made by the Nebraska Legislature. The goals and benchmarks in the database were developed and approved by the Legislature\u27s Planning Committee to present a common-sense and data-driven assessment of key areas important to Nebraskans\u27 quality of life. This database is a joint initiative with the Nebraska Legislature\u27s Planning Committee and the University of Nebraska at Omaha College of Public Affairs and Community Service. Following is an overview highlighting some of the key indicators from the nine primary benchmarks contained in the Nebraska Legislative Planning Database

Nebraska Legislative Planning Database 2012-2013

The Nebraska Legislature\u27s Planning Committee was created in 2009 with the passage of LB 653, in order to help establish a process of long-term state planning with the Nebraska Legislature. The committee was created to assist state government in identifying emerging trends, assets, and challenges of the state and the long-term implications of the decisions made by the Nebraska Legislature. The goals and benchmarks in the database were developed and approved by the Legislature\u27s Planning Committee to present a common-sense and data-driven assessment of key areas important to Nebraskans\u27 quality of life. This database is a joint initiative with the Nebraska Legislature\u27s Planning Committee and the University of Nebraska at Omaha College of Public Affairs and Community Service. Following is an overview highlighting some of the key indicators from the nine primary benchmarks contained in the Nebraska Legislative Planning Database

An Introduction to Lifelong Supervised Learning

This primer is an attempt to provide a detailed summary of the different facets of lifelong learning. We start with Chapter 2 which provides a high-level overview of lifelong learning systems. In this chapter, we discuss prominent scenarios in lifelong learning (Section 2.4), provide 8 Introduction a high-level organization of different lifelong learning approaches (Section 2.5), enumerate the desiderata for an ideal lifelong learning system (Section 2.6), discuss how lifelong learning is related to other learning paradigms (Section 2.7), describe common metrics used to evaluate lifelong learning systems (Section 2.8). This chapter is more useful for readers who are new to lifelong learning and want to get introduced to the field without focusing on specific approaches or benchmarks. The remaining chapters focus on specific aspects (either learning algorithms or benchmarks) and are more useful for readers who are looking for specific approaches or benchmarks. Chapter 3 focuses on regularization-based approaches that do not assume access to any data from previous tasks. Chapter 4 discusses memory-based approaches that typically use a replay buffer or an episodic memory to save subset of data across different tasks. Chapter 5 focuses on different architecture families (and their instantiations) that have been proposed for training lifelong learning systems. Following these different classes of learning algorithms, we discuss the commonly used evaluation benchmarks and metrics for lifelong learning (Chapter 6) and wrap up with a discussion of future challenges and important research directions in Chapter 7.Comment: Lifelong Learning Prime