GFAR participated in the 1st International e-Conference on Germplasm Data Interoperability (https://sites.google.com/site/germplasminteroperability/), which took place between December 6th and December 20th, 2013 and was jointly organized by Bioversity International, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and Agro-Know Technologies and supported by the agINFRA EU project.
The aim of this e-Conference was to bring together stakeholders in the area of plant germplasm and traits. The participants discussed the current status of the interoperability between the different data sources and resources, such as the metadata schemas and classification systems used, and the Linked Data approach to be followed in order to enable the linking of data from heterogeneous data sources and in various data formats.
The conference featured speakers from major players in the biodiversity area like Bioversity, INRA, CIAT, GBIF, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, CAAS, CIMMYT, the Italian CRA, the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, from projects like VIBRANT, BioVel, EURISCO, GENESYS, the Agricultural Data Interoperability Interest Group of the Research Data Alliance (RDA), and from global organizations like FAO, GFAR and the CGIAR.
The e-Conference consisted of four sessions:
1. The vision of Linked germplasm Data (6/12/2013)
2. Status of data and metadata for germplasm (11/12/2013)
3. Setting up an infrastructure for the germplasm data (19/12/2013)
4. Semantic standards and metadata needed for bridging the germplasm data to the breeding / in situ / on farm data (20/12/2013)
GFAR contributed to session 3 with Valeria Pesce's presentation on “Publishing germplasm vocabularies as Linked Data”, available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL9qSTXypCw.
All presentations as well as recorded discussion sessions are available from the e-conference web site: https://sites.google.com/site/germplasminteroperability/.