Agricultural Education Workshop 2012

The "Workshop on Agricultural Education, Methods, Practices and Technologies" (AgEdWS12) is now over. It took place at Pollenzo, Bra, Italy, on October 25, 2012, right after Green Ideas 2012. The Workshop was attended by about 10 people and consisted of presentations as well as hands-on sessions on several tools. You can find the agenda of the Workshop here, including the presentations of each participant. A detailed description of the workshop is also available through the FAO/AIMS website.

Introduction to the Workshop

Not only I was facilitating the Workshop, introducing each one of the speakers, but I also got to make two presentations, the introduction to the workshop and a presentation about the networks of content providers/the Organic.Edunet network. I was really glad to attend the presentations of Karen Vignare (Michigan State University) on the MetroAg MOOC concept, as well as the one from the FBK team on ontologies and classification schemes used in the educational context. In general, I am pretty satisfied about how the workshop ended, even though the results could be even better if we had more time for the preparations (including our presentations as well!). However, it seems that work was accumulated after my recent trip to Limassol, Cyprus and only limited time was left for adding the final touches for this workshop from my side. You may find photos from the AgEdWS12 Workshop here.

Pollenzo is a beautiful village, consisting of some traditional buildings as well as an archaeological site within the village. The University of Gastronomic Sciences is hosted in a magnificent building that belongs to some centuries ago.

Reaching Pollenzo from Athens was a challenging task, as the route was the following:

1. Suburban railway from home to Athens Airport
2. Flight from Athens to Rome
3. Flight from Rome to Turin
4. Bus from Turin airport to Turin train station
5. Train from Turin to Bra
6. Taxi from Bra to Pollenzo.

It took us more than 7 hours in total, but it deserved it. We arrived at Pollenzo at 19.30 and at 19.45 we had to be at the hotel's lobby to join the rest of the team for dinner, at the excellent Soffitta. The night was short, as presentations had to be revised and emails had to be replied. However, the Workshop on Thursday was better than expected, so I made up for that.

Green Ideas 2012

Green Ideas is always a big celebration for the Agro-Know team (except maybe for the one organizing the event, as (s)he has so many things to take care of, even after the end of the event...)! During the Green Ideas 2011 event, which was held at Mesta, a small traditional village of Chios island, Greece, more than half of the Agro-Know team traveled and actually participated/supported the event.

This year, Green Ideas 2012 takes place at Pollenzo, Bra, Italy and in fact the first day of the event must be over by now. Some of my colleagues have already been there since Sunday or arrived just today. This time I am not participating to the event (even though my Olympus E-300 is already there to grab some photos of the event!), but I will be facilitating the "Workshop on Agricultural Education, Methods, Practices & Technologies", that will take place right after Green Ideas 2012 at the same place. In fact, some of the Green Ideas 2012 participants will also participate in the Workshop.

I will be flying to Turin, Italy on Wednesday and despite the fact that reaching Pollenzo looks like a small adventure, I am really looking forward to go there, meet friends and have a great time during the Workshop!

VOA3R 6th project meeting and Open Access Workshop

VOA3R Family Photo @ Cyprus

I had the opportunity to visit Cyprus for the first time during October 15-17, for the 6th project meeting of the VOA3R project. In addition, we have worked closely with George Adamides, the local host from Agricultural Research Institute (ARI) and we managed to organize a Workshop on "Open Access and Agricultural Repositories Workshop" right after the meeting, on October 18th, 2012.
The meeting was successful, since there was active participation and long discussions on pending issues, in order to make sure that everything will be on time, just 8 months before the end of the project.

Workshop participants working
on the VOA3R portal

The aim of the Workshop was to bring in touch stakeholders from Cyprus (researchers, students, practitioners etc. in the area of agriculture and agricultural research) in order to create and support a network, as well as to present the tools and services developed by related EU projects, like VOA3R and agINFRA, that could be used in order to facilitate the daily research work of the participants. It was rather successful, as it was attended by about 10 Cypriot stakeholders, mainly (if not all) researchers. I was facilitating the Workshop, making an introductory presentation and introducing each presenter before his presentation, which was really nice since all speakers were colleagues and friends of mine.
Imma Subirats from FAO/AIMS made a long but really interesting presentation about Open Access, which was followed by two case studies of Open Access repositories: The SLU Epsilon repository (presented by Urban Ericsson from SLU) and Organic Eprints (presented by Ilse Rasmussen from ICROFS), both based on Eprints software. Then there was a presentation of the repository tools used in Open Access repositories, like the AgriOcean DSpace (by Dirk Leinders from University of Hasselt) and Eprints (by Alejandro Engelmann from SLU). The following session was a hands-on session on the VOA3R portal, as a networking platform for researchers, practitioners and students in the agricultural context. For collecting the feedback we used both the online questionnaire as well as some additional focused ones provided by the UAH team. After a really interesting lunch break (I really loved the buffet lunch at Atlantica Miramare Hotel!), it was time for another interactive session, supported by the agINFRA project, which included a short presentation of the project and its expected outcomes as well as a discussion during which we tried to identify the needs of the participants as regards the tools, services and infrastructure used, barriers they face regarding the open access to content and other aspects. You may find additional information about the Workshop in my post in the FAO/AIMS website.

In general it was a fruitful workshop and I feel really grateful to the people who got involved in it and dedicated their time in order to prepare and present their presentations. I felt really glad that we had the opportunity to engage some stakeholders from Cyprus in such a discussion about Open Access and repositories and I really enjoyed the related discussions that we had with the brave ones who stayed until the end of the Workshop. I also hope that I will have the opportunity to visit Cyprus again in the near future, as due to the lack of time I did not have the opportunity to go around and see things!

Open Access Week @ AIMS: AK's contribution

I have to admit that this was a really nice surprise: I can see myself at the FAO AIMS (Agricultural Information Management Standards) portal! This is due to a work on our collaboration with ISKME on the Green OER Commons microsite and collection, in the context of the Open Access Week @ AIMS that my colleague Madalina Ungur and me submitted some time ago and was accepted for presentation through a webinar that will take place on 25/10/2012.

Even though I will not be able to attend the webinar (as I will be facilitating the Workshop on Agricultural Education, Methods, Practices and Technologies" (AgEdWS12) on the same day), it was still really nice for me to see my name featured at the FAO AIMS portal. As I am an agronomist myself, I know what FAO means in my research area and I could never even imagine that some years ago, while I was still studying. For us, FAO was something bigger than life, with its huge organization and publications/courses/materials etc. that could be used as a basis for our own assignments & research.

The full description of our work, titled "OER Commons Green: Aggregating Best-in-Class Green Open Educational Resources" can be found here.

Organic.Lingua 4th project meeting @ Paris

The Organic.Lingua 4th project meeting took place between 18-20/9/2012 at Paris, France, at the premises of INRA. I knew that I had a lot of work to do for the meeting, since I had to present a wide variety of things, some of which were not exactly in the heart of what I am actually working on (e.g. the presentation of the Organic.Lingua online survey and the Evaluation & Validation plan of the project - there were colleagues of mine working on these topics).

The discussions during the meeting were mainly technical, focusing on the language components and the additions/improvements that are expected within the next months regarding the automated translations, enriched with some "lighter" sessions, like the project's vision session, content population plan and status, dissemination etc. I had the opportunity to present the AgLR (Agricultural Learning Repository) Tool, on which we have been working with the technical team of AK for quite some time now. We managed to identify some issues; however, we didn't have time for the planned hands-on session, which would also provide really useful feedback...

The meeting took longer than expected, so any plans for sightseeing were not applicable. Despite that fact, we managed to visit some really interesting places for dinner (Chez Paula was one of them). However, the hotel room was for once more rather disappointing...located in a not-so-safe-looking area, it has not been refurbished for quite a long time. Mold was all over the bathroom, while the furniture were badly treated in various cases. At least the mattress was unexpectedly comfortable! Breakfast was rather limited but a huge improvement compared to the really poor served in my previous stay in Paris.

All in all, the meeting was successfully completed, leaving some space for improvements in the next months. It left me with quite a lot of things to do within the next weeks, but I am quite sure that other obligations/deadlines etc. will make this quite impossible...

Working away from office - my mobile office

One of the things I really love about my job is that I may work not only in the office but from home, in coffee shops, while travelling etc. Ok, there is always the danger to spend all free time working this way, but still the fact that you don't have to go to the office in order to move on with your daily tasks is in most cases a big advantage.

Working during a flight: Mobile office!

For example, in the case of a strike of the public means of transportation, I may as well work from home. In case I want to work in a more fun way, I may take my netbook and go to a WiFi-enabled coffee shop or even a park to work from there. It is really important that I rarely depend from hard-copies of documents, so mostly from files that are either stored in the cloud or available in my external 2.5-inch hard disk. In the rare case that e.g. a document is required in printed form for reviewing or I have to go through a large deliverable, then I only have to remember about that before leaving the office.
I like the idea of a mobile office. I have managed to do a significant amount of work during and in-between flights (e.g. preparing my presentation for the next day, reading supporting documents for a meeting or replying offline to emails to be sent later), during commuting to work (e.g. checking my emails using my mobile phone, taking notes for the day, organizing my tasks etc.) and while waiting for my number to come in e.g. a bank (I usually update the twitter accounts of projects). I can take advantage of this short travel times in order to be productive and organize my work.

Trip to Naxos island - working on board!

A collection of useful stuff like notepads, diaries and color pens, tablet or netbook (not all the time!), usb sticks and a portable USB hard disk (for keeping some important files with me all the time), hard copies of papers/deliverables/DoW for reviewing and commenting on, chargers, cables and adapters are usually in my backpack to make this possible.

Of course this is not always good, as every occasion and free time can be really easily turned into additional work time but that's the nature of my job, which I really like! 

MTSR 2012

MTSR 2012 - the 6th Metadata and Semantics Research Conference will take place at Cadiz, Spain, between 28-30/11/2012. One of the special tracks will be the 5th International Workshop on "Metadata and Semantics for Agriculture, Food and Environment" (AgroSem2012), to which I also participated last year (as a part of the MTSR 2011 Conference in Izmir, Turkey).

This time I will be more actively involved in the organization of the Workshop, as a member of the Program Committee. Apart from disseminating the Workshop, I am also submitting two research papers as a co-author (one of them is about the recently over Organic.Balkanet project and its use of metadata) and I will get to review some of the submitted paper (hopefully not mine!).

Due to the nature of the Workshop, the VOA3R project is tightly connected to it, so a number of submissions from VOA3R-related authors is expected. After all, Agro-Know and VOA3R are some of the supporters of this workshop!

Agro-Know server issue

Today I realized that I could not access my Agro-Know email account since early in the morning; I kept receiving a message about authentication problems. As soon as I got in the office, I went through the various services hosted at the Agro-Know server only to see that none of them (email, blog, wiki etc.) was available.

I really had to send some rather urgent early-morning emails, to revise stuff at the Agro-Know blog and get some information from the wiki, so I realized how important this server is... it is hard to work without internet, but then it is also scary when you realize how much we depend on this hardware to work with all these Agro-Know server-based services!

I hope that the issue will be fixed soon...

**EDIT** The issue was indeed temporary and was fixed in some 30 mins later, after communicating the issue to our web hosting service.

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!