Me and my Work!

Development of Semantic Standards

• Development of information exchange standards in the agricultural domain for: documents, learning resources, projects, experts, organizations, news and events. This entails management of the AgMES Namespace and continuous management of officially public standards such as AGRIS Application Profile and Ag-Events Application Profile, testing of exported metadata and providing recommendations on changes. (http://www.fao.org/aims/ap_applied.jsp)
• Development of a Learning Resource Application Ontology work involves my management of the project and in addition participation in Inter-organization Working Group and the Dublin Core Education Working Group. The supervision of a Letter of Agreement with the Agricultural University of Athens and collaboration with Organic.Edunet Project (European funded project on learning repositories for organic agriculture).
• Content development of FAOs multilingual agricultural thesaurus (AGROVOC is available from: http://www.fao.org/aims/ag_alpha.jsp)
• Testing and preparing guidelines for the new AGROVOC Concept Server (http://www.fao.org/aims/agrovoccs.jsp)
• Participation in European Union funded project for a European portal on Ethics in Science and Technology (EthicsWeb) Project. This will involve analysis of the information domain, preparation of standards, guidelines and XML schemas for information exchange.
• I am also managing projects on Crop Wild Relative Ontology, Language Ontology and Organizations Ontology.

Establishing Networks with partners

• My main role in establishing networks is to serve as an advisor to all the internal and external partners who wish to apply FAO standards and tools.
• I am responsible for the maintenance and content management of the Agricultural Information Management Standards (AIMS) Website. (http://www.fao.org/aims/)
• I moderate mailing lists (Agstandards, AGROVOC) which support the uptake of our standards and promote the use of information management standards provided by FAO and its partners. (http://www.fao.org/aims/contacts.jsp)
• I have served as a referee for many journal/conference articles. I am also co-editor of the upcoming Journal on Agricultural Metadata and Semantics.
• I am responsible for the management of AOS workshops and setting up of the community portal of the AIMS website. All these actives are aimed at bringing the community closer to each other and facilitating efficient information exchange. (http://www.fao.org/aims/pub_workshops.jsp)
• I am responsible for managing the promotion of the work of my group’s work via publication in external journal, maintenance of Wikipedia pages, posting news and events to Blogs and mailing lists, producing and maintaining fact sheets, leaflets, CDs etc.
• I also support the work of an inter-agency content management taskforce (entitled to provide standards and guidelines for the wider community) through moderation of its Blog and Wiki, participating in task force meetings and writing regular reports on its activities.

International Information System on Agricultural Standards and Technology (IISAST) Directory Services and Digital Libraries

• I am responsible for the design, implementation, management and further development of AgriFeeds (http://www.agrifeeds.org), a service to aggregate news and events in the agricultural domain.
• Design, management and overseeing implementation of tools for creating metadata using established standards. This involves the DLIO Metamaker (http://www.fao.org/aims/tools/metamaker.jsp), Organizations Metamaker (under development), and Events Metamaker (available as stand-alone software).
• I am responsible for project management and semantics development of the future AGRIS Database. (http://www.fao.org/agris/)
• Testing of new standards with partners such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• I will oversee the design and development of a prototype for accessing distributed Learning Object Resources.

Knowledge management

• I am involved in the review of Thematic Knowledge Networks established in FAO in the last two years to facilitate knowledge sharing.
• I am also serving as a resource person for the Inter-departmental working group on Knowledge Management which will work on Knowledge Management Strategy and Roadmap for FAO (http://www.fao.org/KnowledgeForum/)

My work involves management of the above projects and participation in projects of other colleagues where my expertise is necessary.