agINFRA technical meeting in Athens

A one-day meeting for the technical partners of the agINFRA project took places at the premises of Agro-Know on 21/6/2012. The meeting was attended by the majority of the technical partners of the project and since some parts of it were closely related to my work (such as the content population and the workflows that could be used during the project for the connection of new repositories), I took some time participating in it.

Nikos Manouselis presenting (photo by Jaakko)

It was a nice opportunity to meet colleagues from Serbia, Spain, Hungary etc., with whom we have never communicated in the past (since my tasks in the project are not exactly technically-oriented), but still it was nice watching these presentations and getting to know how (technical) things are moving in the project.

Short lunch break (photo by Jaakko)

Jaakko Lappalainen from UAH has already made a short blog post describing the event, which is really interesting (and contains more photos of the event)!

VOA3R 5th project meeting

I recently came back from Paris, where the 5th project meeting of VOA3R was held during 29-31/5/2012. The meeting was interesting as always, discussing a wide variety of issues including the project's management, quality assurance & risk management aspects, dissemination and affiliation plans and activities etc. My part had to do with the content population activities of the project, as I am a member of the GRNET team which is leading the specific work package. The task is rather complex, since it heavily relies on other WPs, such as the one developing the VOA3R metadata AP, the harvesting and portal parts, the quality assurance and dissemination/affiliation plans.We already had some delays with these tasks but during the meeting we tried to describe the current status and define the next steps for the next months.

Presenting the next content population tasks (photo by Imma Subirats)

It was a nice opportunity for me to meet Diane (since we had to solve some issues for the Organic.Lingua project) and David Martin from UAH who has only recently joined the team and has also helped in the Organic.Lingua tasks.

Panoramic photo of the meeting (photo by Imma Subirats)

Apart from that, I had the opportunity to see Paris and its sights for the first time. I managed to get some hours off and really quickly visit the major sights including the Eiffel tower, the Notre Dame, Champs-Élysées, Monmartre, while I also passed just outside the Louvre, taking photos all the time on the road. Despite the bad weather (it was drizzling all the time) I really enjoyed the evening.
Next VOA3R project meeting is to be held in Cyprus, courtesy of George from ARI!