VOA3R - The end...

Well, there's not much to say now... the VOA3R project (Virtual Open Access Agriculture & Aquaculture Repository: Sharing Scientific and Scholarly Research related to Agriculture, Food, and Environment.), funded from the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP), Theme 4 – “Open access to scientific information”, grant agreement n° 250525, is officially over.

I wasn't a VOA3R member from the beginning back in June 2010; I first got involved in the VOA3R project in spring 2011, when I was invited to demonstrate the VOA3R Confolio repository tool in the VOA3R content providers' meeting which was held in the GRNET premises. After that, I started being more actively involved during the summer of 2011, when I was asked to work on the Content Population Methodology deliverable of the project and also participated in the VOA3R Workshop during the EFITA 2011 Conference in Prague, Czech Republic.

My first participation in an event as a VOA3R consortium member. VOA3R Workshop, EFITA 2011 Conference

Since then I was seriously involved in the project, working on the coordination of the content population tasks, organizing metadata evaluation sessions with the content providers, checking the metadata and the tools used for the annotation, explaining the process and the tasks. VOA3R was the biggest project that I had participated since then, so it was by opportunity to apply the experiences and methodologies from other smaller projects (mostly LdV) on a larger scale; I hope that I managed to do a good job!

The project provided me with the opportunity not only to meet a lot of really nice partners (like Ilse from ICROFS, with whom we had met a little bit earlier than VOA3R in a meeting of Organic Eprints National Editors) and also to travel to rather nice destinations for the project meetings (Izmir for the 4th PM, Paris for the 5th PM, Limassol for the 6th PM and Rome for the 7th PM). In addition, I was able to publish the outcomes of the VOA3R project in both journals and conferences.

Presenting the VOA3R platform to Greek agricultural researchers in  2011

The VOA3R project was really active during the 3 years of its life. Some of the project's outcomes are the following:

• The VOA3R portal: A Facebook for agricultural researchers, as I used to say earlier, provides an excellent opportunity to publish your scientific profile, join user communities and share experiences etc. and access more than 2,500,000 bibliographic records related to agricultural research.
• The VOA3R metadata AP: Based on the Dublin Core standard, it is a well-defined and thought metadata application profile, which comes in two flavors: A flat one (Level 2) and an advanced one, FRBR-based (Level 4).
• The infrastructure for maintaining an ever-growing network of repositories from agricultural universities and research centers, to act as a part of the established FAO AGRIS Network, including a well-defined affiliation plan.
• A study on the existing review and publication lifecycles and the proposal of alternative ones.
• A metadata aggregation methodology, which may be adapted and reused in the future.
• Publications in several journals and conferences, such as EFITA and MTSR.

One of the last family photos of VOA3R: Limassol, Cyprus, October 2012

The project will be judged in July 2013 during the 2nd and final review meeting, which will take place in Brussels, Belgium. In the meantime, we still have some time to fine-tune some things and finish pending tasks which were ongoing even at the end of the project.

You may find material about VOA3R at the following sites:

• VOA3R Website
• VOA3R social/research networking portal
• VOA3R Wiki (work in progress)
• Join the VOA3R  group at Facebook
• See the VOA3R photos at Flickr
• Follow VOA3R at Twitter!
• Join the VOA3R group at Linkedin
• See VOA3R-related presentations at Slideshare
• See VOA3R-related videos @ YouTube
• VOA3R Controlled Experiment/Workshop @ EFITA 2011
• VOA3R Controlled Experiment in MTSR 2011
• VOA3R Controlled Experiment in MTSR 2012

09/08/2011 - Tasks

[Organic.Balkanet] Working on a handbook for creating metadata descriptions for training units in Organic.Balkanet MOLE platform
[Organic.Balkanet] Working on revisions for D2.2
[Organic.Lingua] Supporting processes that support the multilinguality purposes of the project.
[CerOrganic] Working on minor issues that came up in the CerOrganic MOLE platform
[VOA3R] Supporting the VOA3R Confolio tool during the Testing Phase of Content Population

I.S.L.E. day

This week I tried to organize my work in a different way and dedicate one day to one project (and its tasks). Today the day was dedicated to I.S.L.E. tasks:

• I prepared a draft version of the template for the ISLE deliverables
• I worked on the learning scenarios that the Agro-Know team is going to present during the Summer School of the project in Malta in a couple of weeks. A went through my presentations again and slightly revised them (these revisions will never end - each time I find something different to revise!) 
• I implemented some of the project's website revisions discussed during the project's 2nd Meeting in Teramo, Italy in February. This took me a lot of time because I am not really familiar with the Joomla! platform and the number of changes was really big... not only I had to make hyperlinks for more than 80 institutional logos, but to create and populate some lists with web links relevant to the project, and I had no idea how to do that. So the help from Yiannis (Devplus) proved to be really valuable!

BSCW Workspace interface

• I worked on the final details of the ISLE workspace (based on the egroupware platform) and started working on the workspace's handbook. I hope I will manage to finish it by tomorrow, since it will cover only the basic functions of the platform. We had to migrate from the BSCW public workspace, as the available storage space was really limiting.

e-groupware Filemanager user interface

In the meantime I had the chance to work on a presentation for the EFITA 2011 Conference that will take place in Prague, Czech Republic between 11-14 July. I also made a little break and revised some of my presentations for the 4th Organic.Balkanet project meeting and training that will take place next week in Maribor, Slovenia.

Then there was this awful lot of emails that had to be answered (some of them immediately!) and some internet connection issues that really disorganized me...it was a good thing that I had all this offline tasks in my schedule, so it was really easy to keep up with my work.

Agro-Know Team

I've been working for Agro-Know since January 2011, when the new offices in Vrilissia were prepared. I've been working with Nikos for quite a long time, during my days at the Agricultural University of Athens and Greek Research & Technology Network (GRNET), working mostly in the Organic.Edunet EU project. It seems that our good cooperation during these days led to my recruitment in the Agro-Know team.

Since January there have been some changes in Agro-Know, as it is constantly developing. New faces have come on board, new projects are coming, my role in the team changes from time to time, evolving to something more interesting and challenging.

The current line-up of the Agro-Know team. A couple of partners are missing but we're still happy!

Today was one of the good days. Even though we faced terrible internet connection problems, we managed to go on with our work, celebrate the b-days of two people and organized something nice for a third one. The weather was fine and we took our first team photo in the balcony of our offices!

I am currently working on various topics for various projects, such as Organic.Edunet, Organic.Balkanet, Organic.Lingua, CerOrganic, I.S.L.E among others, and this makes my work interesting. Training scenarios, implementation of ICT tools in the training context of Organic Agriculture trainers and farmers, curriculum development, annotation of digital resources with metadata, interconnecting digital repositories and providing access to these resources through the Organic.Edunet Web portal. This portal is one of my most important tasks and a significant part of my time is devoted to its improvement and dissemination.

My job gives me the opportunity to travel quite often, and I really love travelling: I like to meet new people, see new places and try to get as much as possible from each place (culture, customs, sights etc.). I usually carry my digicam with me (my Olympus E-300 looks really bulky to fit my business trips...). I even started rating hotels and restaurants, apart from keeping a diary from these trips. In a single word: Experiences!

It's nice working for Agro-Know, and this is obvious!