ERANets as Information Sources

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ERA-Nets as Information Sources

• Gerry Lawson, UK Natural Environment Research
  Council

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The BiodivERsA ERA-Net
Information WP1
Best Practice WP2
Strategy for Common Call WP3
Links with Developing Countries WP4
Coordinated Call for Proposals
Pan-European Research (art 169)
Management, information and dissemination WP5
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Coordination of national Programmes ERA-NET -
Facts and Figures

• Level of ambition of selected CA projects

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Activity Collation Problems

• All ERA-Nets collect Programme information
• Most collect information on Projects
• A few maintain databases of Programmes
• A very few include databases of Project info
• Some collect data on Facilities and
  Infrastructures
• None collect information on Project Outputs (?)
• Most have problems with Classification
• Most have problems with Gap Analysis
• Most have problems Analysing Spend
  (salaries/overheads/shared grants/allocation to
  keywords)
• Many dont consider studentships
• Some dont record EU Region or country of work.

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Yet more problems

• Programme databases have little detail defy
  classification
• Several countries have no Thematic Programmes
• Project databases are structured differently in
  each country.
• Each country has its own classification system
  and wont use anyone elses!
• Re-classification is time consuming and
  subjective.
• Few organisations split funding across
  classifiers.
• Machine classification of abstracts (indexing)
  still needs subjective editing.
• Context searches (Google, Autonomy, Collexis) are
  avaiable but dont help much with classification.

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Which is why we need Ontologies?

• An ontology is a formal knowledge organization
  (representation system).
• It contains concepts, information about these
  concepts, relations between these concepts
• and instances,
• and it contains information about the relations
  between instances and concepts

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Sample ontology for crop pest management
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Too many ontologies?
Existing Thesauri and Knowledge Organization
Systems (KOSs)
Dedicated KOSs
e.g., ASFA thesaurus
e.g., the Multilingual Forestry Thesaurus
e.g., the Sustainable Development website
classification
e.g., biological taxonomies such as NCBI and ITIS
Other thematic thesauri
Non-dedicated KOSs
CABI Thesaurus
AGROVOC
NAL Thesaurus
GEmetGEMET
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What is the starting point?

• FAO maintains the multilingual thesaurus AGROVOC
  since the early 80s
• Other consistent thesauri are maintained by CABI
  in England and the National Agricultural Library
  in the States
• Various other knowledge organization systems are
  scattered around the world
• The existing systems are language biased with
  English as the leading language but GEMET is
  multilingual
• BiodivERsA is using 960 terms in the CBD
  controlled vocabulary (thesaurus) and creating an
  Authority File with synonyms.
• It is hoped that keywords allocated to each
  abstract will allow clustering classification.

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The FAO Agricultural Ontology System
OneFish Portal (application on merged ontology)
Forestry Portal (application on merged ontology)
Crop Portal (application on merged ontology)
Merged Ontology- THE AOS
Normalised Ontology
Normalised Ontology
Common data model for local ontologies
Local Ontology
Local Ontology
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CERIF A European Research Information Standard
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CERIF building a list of researchers
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Using CERIF for a Programme Database.
                                                  
i.       
Geographical criteria  Applicant nationality
Click add after each selection
Choose the country from the list
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Classifications and keywords (free/controlled)
Research Topic
Main scientific disciplines
Choose specific fields
Click add after each selection
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Showing located programmes
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And specific detail of Programmes
Next steps

• Populate with projects from 19 members (Dec 06)
• Extend to non-members with tropical biodiversity
  projects (Feb 07)
• Use Indexing to apply keywords (via Authority
  File Feb 07)
• Invite authors to update add cvs (Mar 07)
• Confirm gap analysis (Mar 07)
• Add research outputs and facilities (June 07)
• Liaise with other relevant ERA-Nets (e.g. SKEP,
  CIRCLE, MARIN-ERA) and NoEs.
• Participate in any EU Research Ontology
  Initiative e.g. with CORDIS.

www.eurobiodiversa.org