AgriProfiles (http://www.agriprofiles.net) is a search portal giving access to profiles of experts and organizations in the field of agriculture, bridging across separately hosted directories and online communities. AgriProfiles is also envisioned as a worldwide effort, expressed in regional, national and institutional collaboration to share professional profiles in an open data environment for agriculture and food security.
| “Regional capacity development partnership is needed to [...] promote more effective regional and sub-regional collaborative research and networking to make better use of available resources and enhance capacity development in the smaller and weaker national systems” (from GFAR and CGIAR, 2011. The GCARD Road Map. Transforming Agricultural Research for Development (AR4D) Systems for Global Impact) |
In order to facilitate better collaboration between agricultural research actors and ensure more effective management of research projects and more rational funding, it is desirable to have access to comprehensive information on people's expertise, areas of activities of Institutions, existing projects in specific areas and countries, related events and publications.
An information system that aims at giving access to such information should: a) go beyond closed communities and directories (search several communities and directories, allow to share people profiles, affiliations, competencies, projects, publications across communities); b) go beyond serendipity, gathering information systematically, organizing data by discipline, affiliation, topic, geographic scope and providing context, in order to discover what is happening and who does what through meaningful relationships.
An existing project that does something similar is VIVO, started at Cornell University in 2003. VIVO is a research-focused discovery tool that enables collaboration among scientists across all disciplines at Cornell University. It allows to browse information on people, departments, courses, grants, and publications following an ontology-based navigation.
Cornell University, the Global Forum on Agricultural Research and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations started working in 2013 on an adaptation of the VIVO model for agricultural research, called AgriVIVO.
AgriVIVO customized the VIVO model to better suit the organization of agricultural research and aggregated data from an initial set of 9 data providers.
In 2014, following a series of discussions with other partners, the concept was renamed AgriProfiles and was broadened.
As a service, AgriProfiles is the global portal, managed by the Global Forum on Agricultural Research in collaboration with Cornell University and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
More broadly, AgriProfiles is also envisioned as a worldwide effort, expressed in regional, national and institutional collaboration to share professional profiles in an open data environment for agriculture and food security. The Interamerican Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture is leading these efforts.
Institutions / projects / initiatives that manage data about people, organizations and events and are interested in contributing data to the pilot can contact us at agrivivo@gmail.com.