Panel: Challenges finding information in food and agriculture on the Web: what can we do better?

Title: Challenges finding information in food and agriculture on the Web: what can we do better?
Date: 2020-09-23 15:00
Slides: erin_antognoli.pdf
laura_meggiolaro.pdf
xiaojing_qin.pdf
Recording: Watch on YouTube



	Erin Antognoli
Erin Antognoli
USDA National Agricultural Library (NAL), Maryland, US
Erin Antognoli is the lead metadata librarian and data curation team lead in the Knowledge Services Division of the USDA National Agricultural Library (NAL) in Beltsville, Maryland. She coordinates the strategy and application of a variety of metadata standards relevant to both United States federal data and agricultural data, including displayed expertise in ISO 19115 for geospatial data, DataCite, and Project Open Data. Antognoli has contributed to the development and improvement of the Ag Data Commons repository and GeoData catalog to promote FAIR data at NAL for over five years. She also serves as co-chair of the CENDI Data Curation Discussion Group, which consists of senior information managers from a variety of United States federal agencies.



	Fabrizio Celli
Fabrizio Celli
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Fabrizio Celli received the MSc in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Rome "Roma Tre" in 2009. He also received the BSc in Psychology from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" in 2015. Currently working for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), he has 11 years of experience as a software engineer. His major skills are web application development, search engines, linked open data, big data, machine learning, and IT security. He has interests in Neuroscience and Theoretical Physics.



	Xiaojing Qin
Xiaojing Qin
Institute of Agricultural Information and Economics (AIE), Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences (BAAFS)
Xiaojing Qin is the supervisor of knowledge and information management team. She works at the Institute of Agricultural Information and Economics (AIE), Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences (BAAFS) in China. She responsible for the construction of agricultural information resources, data sharing, information analysis, and semantic technology research.



	Medha Devare
Medha Devare
Senior Research Fellow at IFPRI
Medha Devare is Senior Research Fellow at IFPRI and leads one of the three Modules of the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture, spearheading efforts to operationalize the FAIR Principles towards Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable data across CGIAR’s 13 Centers. Prior to this she led the CGIAR System‘s Open Access/Open Data Initiative from the CGIAR System Office in France. Medha is an agronomist and microbial ecologist with experience working on and leading projects addressing food and nutritional security and sustainable resource management in South Asia. She also has experience in data management and semantic web standards and tools.



	Laura Meggiolaro
Laura Meggiolaro
Team Leader at The Land Portal Foundation
Over the past 16 years, Laura has been specialising in knowledge management for development with an increasing passion for the information ecology and data ecosystem that characterises the land governance sector where she focuses on enhancing land data discoverability and interoperability through open standards and semantic technologies. She holds a master in communication sciences and a master in economics for developments. Since 2011, Laura has been responsible for the overall management, implementation and expansion of the Land Portal.

Abstract
Panelists will be from FAO, CGIAR, Land Portal Foundation, USDA and Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences.

In a massively distributed environment like Internet, service providers play a critical role to make information findable. While data providers make available excellent information, hubs collect their metadata and give visibility worldwide. However, the metadata that is being produced and exposed is not always uniformly rich, and needs to be optimized. In the case of scientific literature in food and agriculture, there are certain singularities that make it even more complex. From one side, grey literature is critical, while journal articles are not necessarily the only scholarly communication channel that counts. Secondly, while in other sciences English is the pivotal language, in the case of the food and agriculture and due to the diversity of languages being used, it is necessary to consider multilingualism and semantic strategies as a way to increase accessibility to scientific literature. Service providers have taken different approaches to resolve all this, through expanding the coverage of types of documents and considering semantic technologies as a key instrument to enrich metadata. This panel session aims to discuss the challenges that service providers are facing to aggregate content from data providers in food and agricultural sciences. The five panelists will share their experiences from different perspectives:

  1. Ag Data Commons which is the public, government, scientific research data catalog and repository available to help the agricultural research community share and discover research data funded by the United States Department of Agriculture and meet Federal open access requirements;
  2. AGRIS at Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations with more than 12 Million records about publications in up to 90 different languages from 500 data providers;
  3. Beijing agricultural think tank platform which brings together agricultural policy, the development plan, agricultural related reports, agricultural experts data, and statistical data around the world; and
  4. GARDIAN, the Global Agricultural Research Data Innovation & Acceleration Network, which is the CGIAR flagship data harvester across all CGIAR Centers and beyond; and
  5. The Land Portal Library with 60,000 highly enriched resources related to land governance aggregated from a highly specialized sector.