AGROVOC: The linked data concept hub for food and agriculture

Newly acquired, aggregated and shared data are essential for innovation in food and agriculture to improve the discoverability of research. Since the early 1980′s, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has coordinated AGROVOC, a valuable tool for data to be classified homogeneously, facilitating interoperability and reuse. AGROVOC is a multilingual and controlled vocabulary designed to cover concepts and terminology under FAO's areas of interest. It is the largest Linked Open Data set about agriculture available for public use and its highest impact is through facilitating the access and visibility of data across domains and languages. This chapter has the aim of describing the current status of one of the most popular thesaurus in all FAO’s areas of interest, and how it has become the Linked Data Concept Hub for food and agriculture, through new procedures put in plac

TEEAL and AGORA: Off-and online access to the scientific literature of agriculture for the developing world

TEEAL (The Essential Electronic Agricultural Library) and AGORA (Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture) are digital collections of scientific agricultural literature for the developing world. Through both, the agricultural research cycle in the developing world functions more effectively, including in areas where access to the internet is limited, slow, or unreliable, thanks to TEEAL's offline access. This paper discusses the programs' training, outreach, and usage and barriers to it, and the international partnerships that make them possible. Also profiled is the new AgriKnowledge database, which provides access to key unpublished agricultural content, including reports from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's programs and projects

Increasing interoperability between food and agricultural information systems: CGIAR and FAO collaboration

It is crucial that data resources can talk to each other through thesaurus, ontologies and standards. Therfore, the integration of CGIAR controlled vocabularynto the AGROVOC thesaurus is key to interlink our data sets and publications in the food and agricultural domain and produce multilingual quality labeling. The Task Group and a curation team defined the added value for the CGIAR to formally contribute to AGROVOC, and how to organize CGIAR contribution in a coherent workflow. The recommendations are the following: 1. One CGIAR needs to strengthen its contribution to AGROVOC thus supporting the consolidation of the semantic landscape for labeling data in agriculture and food systems. 2.CGIAR centers should wait a bit till the affiliation process is complete so that the appropriate unit that will be responsible for AGROVOC can consume the Agreement since the timeline for the affiliation process is just some few months away. 3.OneCGIAR data managers will have to sustain the collaboration and submit terms to populate the ONECGIAR concepts schema newly created to provide direct visibility of the set of concepts (https://agrovoc.fao.org/skosmosOneCGIAR/cgiar/en/ ). Based on the collaboration concrete results, The TG recommends that the term submission effort and collaboration with FAO continues with proper allocation of data managers’ time and a training plan. Contribution to AGROVOC should be part of the data managers ToRs to concrete provide recognition of this role

Increasing interoperability between food and agricultural systems: CGIAR and FAO collaboration

It is crucial that data resources can talk to each other through thesaurus, ontologies and standards. Therfore, the integration of CGIAR controlled vocabularynto the AGROVOC thesaurus is key to interlink our data sets and publications in the food and agricultural domain and produce multilingual quality labeling. The Task Group and a curation team defined the added value for the CGIAR to formally contribute to AGROVOC, and how to organize CGIAR contribution in a coherent workflow. The recommendations are the following: 1. One CGIAR needs to strengthen its contribution to AGROVOC thus supporting the consolidation of the semantic landscape for labeling data in agriculture and food systems. 2.CGIAR centers should wait a bit till the affiliation process is complete so that the appropriate unit that will be responsible for AGROVOC can consume the Agreement since the timeline for the affiliation process is just some few months away. 3.OneCGIAR data managers will have to sustain the collaboration and submit terms to populate the ONECGIAR concepts schema newly created to provide direct visibility of the set of concepts (https://agrovoc.fao.org/skosmosOneCGIAR/cgiar/en/ ). Based on the collaboration concrete results, The TG recommends that the term submission effort and collaboration with FAO continues with proper allocation of data managers’ time and a training plan. Contribution to AGROVOC should be part of the data managers ToRs to concrete provide recognition of this role

Report of the review of the pilot phase of FAO thematic knowledge networks

The FAO Knowledge Forum was initiated in 2006 as a platform for enhancing exchange of the Organization's wealth of knowledge and expertise. One of the pillars of the Forum was the establishment of Thematic Knowledge Networks (TKNs). A wide range of networks were identified as being supported or managed by FAO in an initial survey conducted in 2006, but it became clear that a new generation of networks should be established, taking full advantage of new technologies, to further enhance FAO's role as a facilitator of knowledge exchange. A pilot phase lasting approximately eighteen months comprised the development of fifteen new TKNs. These networks were planned to foster knowledge sharing, allowing network members to communicate and work more effectively together on common goals or outcomes. The pilot TKNs covered different thematic areas ranging from more normative subject-specific areas to task-oriented groups, and they varied both in complexity and in their membership profiles. KCE provided technical support and guidance, and developed/coordinated the technology platform(s) with support from KCT

Can the clean development mechanism attain both cost-effectiveness and sustainable development objectives?

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), as defined in the Kyoto Protocol, has two objectives: to promote sustainable development in host developing countries, and to improve global cost-effectiveness by assisting developed countries in meeting their Kyoto targets. The aim of this paper is to explore the background of the CDM and discuss to what extent its current design allows it to achieve its dual objective. The first part of the paper is a literature review that includes descriptions of the flexibility mechanisms under the Kyoto Protocol, the CDM’s market potential, and the issues of cost-effectiveness and sustainable development. In the second part of the paper, we discuss to what extent there is a conflict between cost-effectiveness and sustainability, and whether the two objectives of the CDM can be achieved simultaneously. We develop a set of indicators to evaluate non-carbon benefits of CDM projects on the environment, development, and equity, and show how these indicators can be used in practice by looking at case studies of CDM project candidates in the energy sector from Brazil and China. We demonstrate that for some CDM projects there is a trade-off between cost-effectiveness, in terms of a low quota price, and a high score on sustainability indicators. We have reason to believe that the size of the CDM market in some studies is over-estimated since transaction costs and the challenge of promoting sustainable development are not fully accounted for. Also, we find that the proposed set of indicators can be a necessary tool to assure that sustainability impacts of CDM projects are taken into consideration