Standing Committee on Agricultural Research
'Strategic Working Group on Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation Systems 4'
Lisbon, Portugal, 10th October 2017
Paul Newell Price (ADAS) represented the VALERIE project at the 6th meeting of the SCAR SWG AKIS 4 group at the Ministry of Agriculture in Lisbon on Tuesday 10th October 2017.
The meeting provided an opportunity to hear about a variety of experiences and approaches from a range of recently completed and new multi-actor Horizon 2020 (H2020) projects, Thematic Networks and Operational Groups, including:
• “Winetwork” focusing on two common vine diseases
• Smart-AKIS with which VALERIE is collaborating on the development of a knowledge reservoir and Smart Farming Platform
• SheepNet on sheep productivity
• PLAID, AgriDemo F2F and FARMDEMO on best practices for effective demonstration farm activities
• NEFERTITI on networking European farms to boost knowledge exchange
• WaterProtect on better implementation of diffuse water pollution mitigation methods (funded from the same H2020 call alongside the FAIRWAY project)
• FERTINNOWA on sustainable water use in fertigated crops
In a session on common issues for thematic networks and H2020 projects, communication and outputs, websites and "knowledge reservoirs" were discussed. A number of delegates expressed the need for a platform that could act as a single point of entry to access outputs from EU projects, including factsheets, practice abstracts, reports and technology review documents. Perhaps the ‘ask-Valerie’ tool could form the prototype for such a platform? However, it was also acknowledged that such a platform would need funding to perform regular updates of links to repositories, the underpinning ontology (the structured vocabulary that drives the targeted search) and in some cases the factsheets themselves.