CIARD E-Consultation Invite

I got this from my mailbox today. Please disseminate.

"Consultation on the CIARD Framework for Data and Information Sharing
In 2011, CIARD is addressing the topic of sharing and interoperability of data and information for agricultural research for development.There will be an international Expert Consultation in Beijing from 20 to 23 June 2011 with the title "Building the CIARD Framework for Data and Information Sharing".
An electronic consultation will be held from 4 to 15 April on the e-Agriculture platform (www.e-agriculture.org) with the same title, in preparation for the Beijing workshop. Both events will be conducted in English. The e-Consultation will address the following questions:
What are we sharing and what needs to be shared?
What are the prospects for interoperability in the future?
What are the emerging tools, standards and infrastructures?
What actions should now be facilitated by the CIARD Task Forces?
The background document (http://bit.ly/eWaUDf) explains some of the issues behind the questions and provides some material for discussion. Experts in various aspects of this field are acting as resource persons and contributing their observations to the discussions in the e-Consultation;
Balaji Venkataraman, Commonwealth of Learning, Canada
Diane Le Hénaff, INRA (National Institute for Agricultural Research), France
Hugo Besemer, Wageningen University, The Netherlands
Ivo Pierozzi, EMBRAPA, Brazil
Nikos Manouselis, AgroKnows, Greece
We encourage you to participate and contribute from your own experience and expertise. We also request that you give wide publicity to the e-Consultation among your colleagues and invite their participation.
The e-Consultation will be held on the a-Agriculture platform from 4 to 15 April 2011 at http://www.e-agriculture.org
The e-Consultation is hosted by CIARD. For more information on CIARD visit http://www.ciard.net
For specific queries on the e-Consultation and the International Expert Consultation, please contact: Ms. Bi Jieying (jyingbi@yahoo.com)
Active participants in the e-Consultation will be invited by GFAR to present their views at the International Expert Consultation in Beijing in June 2011."

A Very Useful Tool for PhilAgriNet Indexers

I hope PhilAgriNet members are now aware of AgroTagger, a free digital tool that would help those providing input for the PhilAgriNet and AGRIS databases.
AgroTagger is an online tool developed by the Indian Institute of Technology of Kanpur in collaboration with the FAO. The tool, which is available at this URL http://aims.fao.org/category/subject-tags/agrotagger allows the user to assign AgroVoc keywords or tags automatically. Registration (free) is needed to be able to use AgroTagger. Once registered, the user only needs to upload the pdf file to get the standard keywords. This is a very useful tool for indexers of agricultural literature.

Watch Out for the Next PhilAgriNet Seminar-Workshop

The next capacity-building activity of PhilAgriNet will be another seminar-workshop, this time to be held in the Visayas in October . This will enable members and prospective members in the region to participate in this activity. Most of the earlier capacity-building workshops were held in Luzon. It is about time that information providers in the Visayas be given the privilege of learning about information documentation and retrieval.
Members are encouraged to suggest possible venues and topics.