Knowledge, information, and data—and the social and physical infrastructures that carry them—are widely recognized as key building blocks for more sustainable agriculture, effective agricultural science, and productive partnerships among the global research community. Through investments in e‐Science infrastructure and collaboration on one hand, and rapid developments in digital devices and connectivity in rural areas, the ways that scientists, academics, and development workers create, share, and apply agricultural knowledge is being transformed through the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). This paper examines some trends and opportunities associated with the use of these ICTs in agricultural science for development.
Abstract.The movement to share data has been on the rise in the last decade and lately in the agricultural domain. Similarly platforms for publishing scientific and statistical datasets have sprouted and have improved visibility and availability of datasets. Yet there are still constraints in making datasets discoverable and reusable. Commonly agreed semantics, authority lists to index datasets and standard formats and protocols to expose data are now essential. This paper explains how the CIARD RING provides a global linked data catalog of datasets for agriculture. The first part of this paper will describe the Linked Data layer of the CIARD RING focusing on the data model, semantics used and the CIARD RING LOD publication. The second part will provide examples of re-use of data from the RING. The paper concludes by describing the future steps in the development of the CIARD RING.
The agriculture-health-environment system (AHES) is a system that counteracts health problems in a community, such as malaria, whose causes are multi-factorial, emerging from the interaction of agriculture and environment, and whose solutions are through cross-sector cooperation of organizations, such as hospitals, community clinics, and irrigation departments that respond to counteract it. The system's overall objective is to improve the health, social, and economic wellbeing of the target community. The AHES is characterized by a set of organizations that have complex linkages between them. These linkages enable agriculture, health, and environment organizations to generate, disseminate and use data, information, knowledge, and draw resources to counteract a community problem. By defining the linkages, learning about the problem and its solutions across organizations can be hastened giving impetus to the process of change in organizations and in the system. This study introduces a conceptual framework developed using a systems methodology to define the AHES, its component organizations, and their linkages. It then illustrates the application of the conceptual framework to describe a model AHES in the context of its organizational linkages for malaria control.
About 2 billion people in low-income countries are dependent upon smallholding farming for their livelihoods. These are among the world’s poorest people. Most of them lack land tenure and farm in regions with limited land and water resources. Many must cope with drought, desertification, and environmental damage caused by failed land reforms, large-scale monocropping, overgrazing, logging, destroyed watersheds, and the encroachment of new pests and diseases. They use only the most primitive of tools and they lack the knowledge and skills to improve their farming methods, value-add their produce, and compete in national and global markets. Many of these smallholder communities have been devastated by HIV/AIDS. In some regions of sub-Saharan Africa, food production has dropped by 40%, and it is estimated that over the next 20 years, 26% of the agricultural labour force will be lost to this pandemic. And demographic and economic changes in the low-income nations are increasingly leaving farming in the hands of women, who lack the knowledge and resources to farm efficiently.
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