Paris, 9 July 2007


EFITA newsletter / 318 / European Federation for Information Technology in Agriculture, Food and the Environment


The efita 2007 congress last week (without Mick Harkin)
We missed Mick. However the efita 2007 was as interesting and heterogeneous as usual: ICT for agriculture covers broad domains and each of us can not know every thing on all the subjects that are usually presented at efita congresses. However, we always find interesting elements in most of the presentations. E.g. I know nothing about text analysis but I learned that expert system rules may be inferred from text analysis of books dedicated to a scientific or technical domain. Fedro S. ZAZUETA from the University of Florida observed that this method could enable to overcome the difficulty that represent the costs of expertises (little availability of experts, costs of manpower and travels).
The efita congresses are unique opportunities to look at new ICT methods and tools. The next efita congress will take place in 2009 at Wageningen Agricultural University (NL).
Please note that ACTA Informatique will update during this summer the efita.net web site to integrate the articles presented at efita 2007 as we did for the previous congresses from 1997.
Contact: Guy WAKSMAN
E-mail: waksman(a)acta-informatique.fr


No more efita newsletter!
Until 21 May 2007 your Efita newsletter has been one of the weekly highlights of my institute. Unfortunately, since then we did not receive the letter anymore. Is there any reason for this? We would very much appreciate if you could put us back on your mailing list.
Contact: Friedrich KUHLMANN
E-mail: friedrich.kuhlmann(a)agrar.uni-giessen.de


Summer University on Information Technology in Agriculture and Rural Development
29 - 30 August 2007 – DEBRECEN - Hungary
University of Debrecen, Centre for Agricultural Science, Faculty of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development and Hungarian Association of Agricultural Informatics (HAAI) and EFITA with other partners are organizing the Summer University on European level.
The purpose of the conference is to give a forum to exchange information on education, research, applications and developments of Information Technologies in Agriculture and Rural Development and publish the most recent results. This forum is recommended for PhD students and of course everybody welcome! (submission deadline 20 July 2007).
See: http://odin.agr.unideb.hu/su2007/
Parallel with this event the FARMER EXPO will be held at University of Debrecen, Centre for Agricultural Science (29 August - 1 September 2007).
See: http://www.farmerexpo.hu/?lng=eng
Contact: Miklos HERDON
E-mail: herdon(a)agr.unideb.hu


Final Call for papers: Special Session on Agricultural Metadata & Semantics in MTSR'07
11-12 October 2007 - CORFU, Greece

Special Session Chairs:
* Johannes Keizer, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (Italy)
* Nikos Manouselis, Informatics Laboratory, Agricultural University of Athens (Greece)

The aim of the Special Session on Agricultural Metadata and Semantics of MTSR'07 is to bring together researchers and practitioners that are working on agricultural knowledge production, organization, and exchange from a Semantic Web perspective. It aims to serve as a discussion forum where interested experts will present the results of their work, and establish liaisons with other groups that are working on related subjects. In addition, it aims to outline the rich potential of the agricultural knowledge domain as an application field for advanced metadata- and semantic-driven systems and services.

Topics include but are not limited to:
* Agricultural information standards and specifications
* Agricultural metadata schemas and application profiles
* Multilingual agricultural vocabularies, taxonomies, glossaries and thesauri
* Metadata generation, harvesting, exchange in agricultural information systems
* Agricultural knowledge acquisition, elicitation and extraction
* Infrastructures, systems and services for agricultural knowledge organisation
* Repositories and archives for agricultural knowledge
* Agricultural ontology approaches, models, theories, and languages
* Agricultural ontology development, integration, lifecycle, and evaluation
* Management of large ontology-driven agricultural data and knowledge bases
* Applications in domains such as education & training, commerce, public administration

The Special Session will accept extended abstracts (2-4 pages) compatible with LNCS format which will be solicited for peer review. The conference will publish ISBN based CD-ROM proceedings as well as a post-proceedings volume that will be published by Springer under the title "Advances in Metadata and Semantics research".

Authors of accepted papers will be invited to extend their contributions to full papers that will be published in the post-proceedings. Authors of papers presented in the Special Session will also be invited to submit enhanced versions of their papers for potential publication in a planned special issue of a relevant journal.

Important dates:
* Submissions: July 15, 2007
* Notification: July 31, 2007
* Camera-ready: August 31, 2007
* Conference dates: Thursday-Friday, October 11-12, 2007

See: http://infolab-dev.aua.gr/mtsr07/
Contact: Nikos MANOUSELIS
E-mail: nikosm(at)aua(dot)gr


Agritechnica News
13 – 17 November - HANOVER
Career opportunities in European agriculture will be high on the agenda at a conference to be held as part of this year’s Agritechnica, the World’s biggest farm machinery and innovation event.
We particularly want to welcome as many young people as possible from educational institutions Europe” explained conference organiser, Johannes Ritz of event organiser, the DLG. “We expect around 1500 young farmers and students from across Europe plus up to 5,000 from Germany". The programme is practical.
See: http://www.agritechnica.com/entrepreneurs.0.html
Contact: Malene CONLONG
E-mail: M.Conlong(a)dlg.org


A man and his wife, now in their 60's, were celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary.
On their special day a good fairy came to them and said that because they had been so good that each one of them could have one wish.
The wife wished for a trip around the world with her husband.
Whoosh! Immediately she had airline/cruise tickets in her hands.
The man wished for a female companion 30 years younger...
Whoosh... immediately he turned ninety!!! Gotta love that fairy!


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