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!
About the EFITA mailing list
You can use the efita moderated list (>3500 subscribers) to announce any
event / product / web site / joke (!) related to IT in agriculture, environment,
food industry and rural areas.
If you do not wish to receive our messages, please see:
http://www.efita.net to remove your E-mail address
from our mail list.