ERA-Nets as Information Sources

Gerry Lawson, UK Natural Environment Research Council

Information WP1

Management, information and dissemination WP5

Best Practice

WP2

Strategy for Common Call WP3

Links with Developing Countries WP4

Coordinated Call for

Proposals

Pan-European Research (art 169)

The BiodivERsA ERA-Net

Coordination of national ProgrammesCoordination of national ProgrammesERA-NET - Facts and FiguresERA-NET - Facts and Figures

Level of ambition of selected CA projects

33

11

44

22• Information exchange & best practices

• Common strategic issues

• Joint activities

• Joint/common calls (fixed for 2005/2006)

Activity Collation Problems

All ERA-Nets collect Programme informationMost collect information on ProjectsA few maintain databases of ProgrammesA very few include databases of Project infoSome collect data on Facilities and InfrastructuresNone collect information on Project Outputs (?)Most have problems with ClassificationMost have problems with Gap AnalysisMost have problems Analysing Spend (salaries/overheads/shared grants/allocation to keywords)Many don’t consider studentshipsSome don’t record EU Region or country of work.

Yet more problemsProgramme databases have little detail & defy classification Several countries have no Thematic ProgrammesProject databases are structured differently in each country.Each country has its own classification system and wont use anyone elses!Re-classification is time consuming and subjective. Few organisations split funding across classifiers.Machine classification of abstracts (indexing) still needs subjective editing.Context searches (Google, Autonomy, Collexis) are avaiable but don’t help much with classification.

Which is why we need Ontologies?

An ontology is a formal knowledge organization (representation system). It contains concepts, information about these concepts, relations between these conceptsand instances,and it contains information about the relations between instances and concepts

Sample ontology for crop pest management

Too many ontologies?

AGROVOC

NAL Thesaurus

CABI Thesaurus

Dedicated KOSs

Non-dedicated KOSs

e.g., ASFA thesaurus

e.g., the Multilingual Forestry Thesaurus

e.g., the Sustainable Development

website classification

e.g., biological taxonomies such as NCBI and ITIS

GEmetGEMET

Other thematic thesauri

Existing Thesauri and Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs)

What is the starting point?

FAO maintains the multilingual thesaurus AGROVOC since the early 80sOther consistent thesauri are maintained by CABI in England and the National Agricultural Library in the StatesVarious other knowledge organization systems are scattered around the world The existing systems are language biased with English as the leading language – but GEMET is multilingualBiodivERsA is using 960 terms in the CBD controlled vocabulary (thesaurus) and creating an Authority File with synonyms.It is hoped that keywords allocated to each abstract will allow clustering & classification.

CERIF – A European Research Information Standard

CERIF – building a list of researchers

Using CERIF for a Programme Database.

Geographical criteria : Applicant nationality

Choose the country from the list

Click add after each selection

                                                   i.       

Classifications and & keywords (free/controlled)

Main scientific disciplines

Choose specific fields

Research Topic

Click add after each selection

Showing located programmes

And specific detail of Programmes

Populate with projects from 19 members (Dec 06)Extend to non-members with tropical biodiversity projects (Feb 07)Use Indexing to apply keywords (via Authority File – Feb 07)Invite authors to update & add cvs (Mar 07)Confirm gap analysis (Mar 07)Add research outputs and facilities (June 07)Liaise with other relevant ERA-Nets (e.g. SKEP, CIRCLE, MARIN-ERA) and NoEs.Participate in any EU Research Ontology Initiative – e.g. with CORDIS.

www.eurobiodiversa.org

Next steps