Report from the Community Workshop on the Open Science Cloud

On November 13th, 2015, a community workshop on the Open Science Cloud titled "Shaping the Open Science Cloud of the Future" took place in Bari, Italy. Agro-Know was invited as a data-powered SME in order to contribute its expertise in serving the agri-food research community - other communities were represented as well.

This provided us with excellent opportunity to present how three different user types could benefit from the envisaged Ope Science Cloud:

1. Agri-food researchers: I have have spent 13 years in the Agricultural University of Athens; two of them for my MSc. and almost 5 for my PhD. I didn't have any kind of infrastructure suporting me as a researcher back then: I recall copying my data from the lab desktop computer - no laptops back then - using an external parallel Zip drive using 100MB disks (a painfully slow process) or an almost faulty SCSI CD recorder which frequently provided us with lemon copies of the data. When I wanted to share data with our Austrian colleagues I had to create copies of the CDs, check their integrity and then send them to Austria using regular postal service...this makes me (and researchers like me who may have access to the necessary tools and platforms but they do not know how to make use of them) a potential user of the Open Science Cloud, as
   an individual researcher.
2. A data-powered SME: Agro-Know is working closely with agri-food researchers; we understand their needs and serve them by developing data-powered services. Our AKstem product is a fine example, as it provides a cloud-based web app that supports e.g. content providers who wish to publish their research publications through the FAO AGRIS bibliographic database; both the help desk and the metadata ingestion processes are supported by AKstem. In addition, researchers who wish to apply for funding through any of the Horizon 2020 agri-food calls can get support in terms of describing, developing and implementing the mandatory Open Access and Data Management Plan through AKstem. Such services require cloud-based hosting, storage and data services thus making Agro-Know an SME that is a potential customer/user of the Open Science Cloud offerings.
3. A global research data hub: AK is only one of the entities behind agINFRA, which currently involves major players in agri-food research at a global level, including (but not limited to) UN FAO (Global), CGIAR (Global), CABI (UK), GODAN (Global), USDA NAL & AGRICOLA (US), OADA (US), CAAS (China) and EMBRAPA (Brasil). INFRA has evolved from an FP7 project to a global atlas of agri-food research. It embraces all types of information related to agri-food research, such as research data and publications, profiles of researchers, organizations and projects activated in specific research contexts, domain-specific standards, software tools, platforms, thematic repositories, registries and indexes and anything else. However, agINFRA does not aim to be yet another registry or catalog of services and entities: instead, it creates a semantic layer providing rich information about each one of these entities and uses vocabularies for classifying them. In this way, these resources are not only more easily retrieved by queries but related heterogeneous resources are linked and therefore presented together after related queries. agINFRA embraces all types of data providers, no matter how big or small they are - the latter usually have limited technical technical and financial capacity for publishing and sharing their data and this is where agINFRA and its dedicated help desk shines.

A large and ever growing network of agri-food data managers, the FAO AIMS community, supports researchers by openly sharing their knowledge through the AIMS platform in blog posts, webinars, discussion as well as in meetings, such as the ones of the Agricultural Data Interoperability Group of the Research Data Alliance. As a result, agINFRA can test, validate and deploy data usage scenarios that include heterogeneous data types from various data sources all over the world. You should keep in mind that agriculture is a complex science, covering thematic areas that range from traditional crop/animal/food science to food safety, food security, forestry, viticulture and wheat research etc. - all these thematic areas produce and make use of a wealth of heterogeneous data such as physical measurements, sensor data, environmental parameters, weather and soil data, soil maps, images, outcomes of DNA/RNA/protein analysis, antibodies, agricultural trials. These highlight the increased need for cloud and grid-based services for these communities to be served and this highlights the role of agINFRA as a potential customer/user of the Open Science Cloud offerings.

After presenting the big picture, I went back to describing the work of a researcher, who apart from conducting his research, he needs to spend time looking for information on the following:

• Guidance on publishing his research as Open Access; what are the institutional and project policies, what are the available domain-specific repositories to deposit his publications and aggregators etc.;
• Help on where and how to store his data online using a free cloud service for sharing, managing and preserving his data;
• Identify other researchers working on the same research area, related organiations and initiatives/projects etc.
• Funding opportunities to support his research;
• Other...

Searching for such information and ensuring that he always has the latest versions in his hands, consume valuable time that he could dedicate to his work.

So our vision as Agro-Know and agINFRA in terms of implementing the Open Science Framework in our case is for us to be able to support agri-food researchers in the aforementioned activities using cloud-based, customized and open services, thus saving them time that can be allocated in what they know how to do well: their research.

The European Open Science Cloud for Research & agINFRA

Some of the major EU-funded initiatives/networks, and more specifically EUDAT, LIBER, OpenAIRE, EGI and GEANT agreed to join forces and work on a common vision for the European Open Science Cloud for Research which includes eight elements of success for a concrete contribution to the Digital Single Market:

1. Open in design, participation and use
2. Publicly funded & governed with the 'commons approach'
3. Research-centric with an agile co-design with researchers and research communities
4. Comprehensive in terms of universality and inclusiveness of all disciplines
5. Diverse & distributed empowering network effects
6. Interoperable with common standards for resources and services 
7. Service-oriented as well as protocol-centric 
8. Social connecting diverse communities

(for more info, you may refer to the Position Paper at Zenodo).

By joining forces, these networks will be able to identify and address existing overlapping in terms of infrastructure and services provided to the end users and meet the requirements of research communities in terms of infrastructure and tools - but they will need to understand the actual needs of each community that will be served (including our agri-food research one).

These news are extremely important for the research community in various disciplines, as biodiversity (see LifeWatch), agriculture and food security (see agINFRA), marine and aqua (see iMarine & BlueBridge), which have been funded through various calls and have allowed researchers to move on with their research.

agINFRA, an ex-FP7 project and currently a research data hub for the agrifood community, engages some of the biggest players in the agri-food research context - at a global level:

• The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (UN FAO)
• CGIAR, with its fifteen (15) research centers all over the world
• CABI (UK)
• Wageningen UR
• The Global Open Data for Agriculture & Nutrition (GODAN)
• Open Agricultural Data Alliance (OADA)
• The Agricultural Data Interoperability IG (IGAD) of the Research Data Alliance (RDA)
• The Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS)
• EMBRAPA (Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária)
• USDA NAL and AGRICOLA
• ...and many more

Through these collaborations, agINFRA is working on the following:

1. Enhancing discoverability of agri-food research by building a global atlas / index of agricultural research;
2. Building a semantic layer that will allow the combination, enrichment and enhancement of heterogeneous information from multiple sources;
3. Supporting research projects and organizations that (need to) publish their outcomes through a dedicated help desk service;
4. Engaging a very active community that consists of all agri-food data managers as well as information and knowledge managers at a global level (FAO AIMS & IRDA GAD)
5. Developing, deploying and testing data-rich and complex agri-food research applications and systems on various thematic areas, such as food safety, agricultural trials, forestry, viticulture research etc.

What do users of a hub like agINFRA need (among others)?

• Well informed data & knowledge managers in their institutions (e.g. universities);
• to guide them through the process of open access publishing in the appropriate repositories, data management and hosting services, use of domain-specific standards etc.
• Online help desk to ask more complex questions:
• Where should I deposit my open access publication?
• How can I be compliant with the Horizon 2020 Open Access Policy?
• Which are the licenses that apply to my research outcomes?
• Where can I find data management services for storing, organizing and sharing my research data?
• Where can I find data of interest to me as a researcher?
• What are the funding opportunities in my domain? Where can I contact researchers working on the same research context as I do?
• Simple cloud service: A Dropbox for researchers, to store, share and find online their research data.

Let's see if and how such requirements will be met by the Open Science Cloud in the near future; the envisaged services look really promising but they will need to be fine-tuned after consultations with the research communities. Tomorrow I will have the opportunity to present the agri-food use case (of agINFRA) during the Open Science Cloud workshop that takes place in the context of the EGI Community Forum 2015 in Bari, Italy :-)

It's one of these days...

...where people just disappear from the office, traveling at the same time and participating in (interesting!) events all over Europe:

• Nikos Mar. is traveling to Brussels for the ACT project meeting and the joint ECVET-STEP - ACT Final Conference;
• George is participating in the FREME Hackathon in Leipzig, Germany;
• Theo is attending the 2nd International Workshop "Creating Impact with Open Data in Agriculture and Nutrition" in The Hague;
• Effie is also traveling to the Hague for the for the 1st OpenMinTeD Interoperability Workshop

...and I am packing my stuff for Bari, Italy, where I will participate in the Community Workshop on the Open Science Cloud: Shaping the Open Science Cloud of the Future on Friday 13/11.

It's been quite a long time since I last saw this happening and a long time since my last business trip (it must be more than one year, if I exclude a domestic one).

I am sure that the Agro-Know office will be fully packed again on Monday. :-)

#LifeAtAK: Really, where is everybody? 😆

A photo posted by Agro-Know (@agroknow) on Jul 24, 2015 at 6:55am PDT

ODI Summit 2015 & Agro-Know

The ODI Summit themed "Celebrating Generation Open" takes place today, 3/11/2015 at London, UK - obviously organized by the Open Data Institute. If you ask me (and many more), it is the biggest Open Data event of the year. Globally. It provides the opportunity to a wide variety of stakeholders to gather and shares their views, updates and ongoing work on open data.

Agro-Know is there, represented by our CEO Nikos Manouselis, who was really excited after attending the Summit last year. Since then, we had the opportunity to get to know the work of ODI better and even got the chance to work with their lovely team on the GODAN Discussion Paper (see also here). On top of that, our COO Giannis Stoitsis successfully completed ODI's Train the Trainer course, becoming a certified Open Data Trainer and since then he has delivered a number of courses on the topic. Last but not least, we have been working on joint project proposals with ODI during the last months and we are really looking forward to see them accepted and start working on their implementation. :-)

I am sure that Nikos will make the most of of this event, and he will come back to the office full of ideas and new connections, among others - any memorabilia from the event will also be more than welcome!

P.S. Did I mention that Agro-Know has recently become an ODI member? :-)

Big Data apps for food safety; where are they?

We frequently refer to the highly important role of big data in the agri-food context, food & food safety but which are the big data-powered applications that already exist and serve real needs in this context? Agro-Know recently received a related question through a tweet:

@AgroKnow @WorldBank could you say me wich are the applications of big data for Food, or foodsafety? I´m very interested Thanks

— luis couto (@LuisCouto_Gz) October 26, 2015

The response is surprisingly not easy and a recent blog post by Nikos Manouselis (Agro-Know CEO) also poses the same question: Is there really a substantial purpose for using big data in this context or is this work taking place in the context of academic exercises?

I have described one of the really promising efforts in this context (the collaboration between IBM and Mars Inc.) but if we are looking for something even more publically available, then we should look for alternatives.

If you happen to be aware of any big data-powered apps for food safety, please leave a comment below! :-)

On the concept of staleholders

The other day I had a pretty urgent task to complete: Two of our EU projects needed feedback from potential end users of their approaches and outcomes in order to help us understand if we have produced something meaningful and useful to them; one of them is looking at the existing gaps between education and actual professional needs while the other is focusing on the competences required in the same context (both of them activated in the agriculture and green contexts in general). In this context, both projects had online surveys prepared and ready to be completed by potential recipients of an email invitation.

Such projects usually aim to provide solutions to real problems of a predefined target group. In this context, they usually get the initial information and current status from desktop research, they validate these issues through initial workshops that aim at the elicitation of actual user requirements, they start building solutions based on them, they validate these solutions through trials and then, as soon as the solution seems mature enough, this goes public in the form of a public consultation.

What I had to do was to compile two lists of recipients of the corresponding email invitations (one for each case) and prepare a short invitation text for the email, customized for each case. Since I am a big enemy of spam (I receive an awful lot of them on a daily basis), the recipients of my lists were carefully selected, so that only people that might be interested in each survey were included. The invitations were sent to about 15 and 35 recipients respectively (some of them were common). I did not require a response in my email and I have not checked the responses yet. In addition, none of my emails bounced back, so they were all sent to valid email addresses. In the first couple of days, I only received one (kind) response to my email, mentioning that they will complete the survey and that they would also forward the invitation to potential stakeholders.

Have you ever contacted friends, colleagues and other contacts asking for their feedback on something that may be of interest to them but never hearing of them?

My experience from similar efforts in the past shows that the response rate is really-really low; we only get a low number of responses to similar questionnaires from people that ideally should be interested in the specific topic. Why this happens, I don't know: it might be due to lack of time for completing the survey, lack of interest in the specific topic, ignorance in general - maybe it is the way the are presented to them (dull/boring) or the fact that they already receive a lot of similar requests so they have stopped responding to them.

This is when a typo I made in a report I was preparing gave me the idea of the concept; were are referring to staleholders, meaning potential stakeholders that have stop being interested or responsive about a topic that should be of interest to them. I guess that such people should have been interested at first, but for any reason (like the aforementioned ones) they are not interested in it anymore. Stale may refer to both the status of the user as well as to the information that he/she receives. Sounds funny but true at the same time!

#Staleholders: Users that should be interested in e.g. new products but still they are inactive and not responsive :-P

— V. Protonotarios (@vprot) October 16, 2015

The point is that since such projects are working on providing solutions for these users, and they spend time and effort for this purpose, then we need to find ways to actually raise their interest and engage them. Of course this is not possible to take place at 100% but the response rate needs to be improved and since face to face meetings have obvious restrictions (number of seats, time and place limitations), an alternative approach should be identified.

According to the Merriam Webster Dictionary, stale is defined as "not interesting or new; boring or unoriginal"

If you have any ideas about that, please let me know (through a comment) and I will be eternally grateful to you!

Upgrading my work laptop to Windows 10...

...while actually working on deliverables and other stuff. How smart is that? :-P

I tried to postpone it but I get this weird urge whenever an update is available - no matter what so I decided to move on at this very moment! For the time being I am working and upgrading at the same time... fingers crossed!

Our paper for the EDEN Open Classroom 2015 got accepted :-)

Some weeks ago, we prepared and submitted a paper titled "Environmental Education Through Enquiry and Technology: The Case of the GreeNET Poject" for the EDEN Open Classroom 2015 Conference, that will take place in Athens, Greece between 18-21/9/2015. According to the organizers, "the Conference incorporates the final event of the Digiskills project, a European project demonstrating ways to involve school communities in innovative teaching and learning practices, and empower teachers and trainers to use, share and exploit unique resource, as well as the GreeNET project that aims to address the increasing necessity to develop an integrative approach in environmental education. The timing will also make several of the conference activities the first steps in the sustainability of the Open Discovery Space project, one of the ever-largest EU co-funded educational networking initiative."

On Friday we received a notification from the Program Committee that our paper has been accepted for presentation at the conference and inclusion in the ISBN-identified Conference Proceedings (to be published in both printed and electronic versions). :-)

The paper describes the tools developed and used by the GreeNET project, namely the GreeNET Inventory, the GreeNET Best Practice Authoring Tool and the GreeNET Moodle. I wish I could share some more details on these, but I will have to go prepare my slides for the presentation now; the presentation will take place on Sunday, September 20th Saturday, September 19th 2015 and you are invited to attend :-)

Change of role - change of signature

I took some time today to revise my email signature, in order for it to reflect my new role in the team - Senior Project Manager! It feels strange to see this revision in the signature, even though I adapted in my new role pretty quickly; after all, I am no stranger to project management! I spent several years in the past supporting the management (and mostly the implementation) of several of our projects and have flown thousands of miles traveling all over Europe in order to represent Agro-Know (and not only) in project meetings, Conferences and Workshops

I also did the corresponding revisions in my Agro-Know wiki profile; I still have to revise the text on the corresponding website Team page. Small but still significant revisions.

PubAg: Providing Open Access to agricultural research

PubAg is the National Agricultural Library's (NAL) search system for agricultural information. It provides access to quality agricultural research publications both from USDA-affiliated researchers as well as from external ones. authored and other highly relevant agricultural research. When it was launched, it started with a number of 40,000 full-text journal articles provided by USDA staff  and including about 450,000 citations to both internal and external publications. The aim of the National Agricultural Library is the enrichment of the available content on a monthly basis, by adding about 20,000 citations each month.

PubAg provides access to full-text articles relevant to the agricultural sciences, along with citations to peer-reviewed journal articles. Each resource is described with metadata, including

• Title
• Abstract
• NAL terms: They are clickable, so by clicking one of them, you get a list of results tagged with the specific term.
• Names of Authors: They are clickable, so by clicking one of them, you get a list of results from the specific author.
• Citation
• Link to the publisher's record (through DOI): The link can be used to access the metadata record of the publisher and hopefully the full-text article, if it is openly shared (i.e. it is not available behind a paywall).

In addition, each metadata record can be exported as CSV or printed; in the latter case, the user receives a printer-friendly version of the metadata record.

A metadata record in PubAg

On the other hand, when a user want to perform a query with specific terms, he can use a free-text search box. Words entered into the search box are automatically translated into subject terms from the NAL Thesaurus (NALT) and the corresponding documents tagged with these NALT terms are retrieved and presented to the user.

List of results after a query

As of today, PubAg provides access to about 972,000 metadata records and 42,000 full-text articles. 200,000 records reflect on research published after 2012, which makes the content really up to date.

 I was also surprised to find a few of my publications on the PubAg portal!

Who would have thought...(some of) my publications available through PubAg!

Thanks to the ongoing work related to GACS (Global Agricultural Concept Scheme), this large database of quality agricultural research outcomes will be easily interconnected with others, such as the FAO AGRIS (that Agro-Know is maintaining and expanding, boasting almost 8M records) and the CAB Abstracts (about 2M records). This is expected to greatly facilitate the work of agrifood researchers, information and knowledge managers, among others.

Turning three thesauri into a Global Agricultural Concept Scheme from CIARD Movement