Overview
This is just a brief summary of ontology and web service integration discussions in Tsukuba, Japan in the afternoon of Wednesday, 13 February 2008, between R. Bruskiewich ( International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Philippines), National Institute for Agrobiological Sciences (NIAS), Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) Information Network (MAFFIN), the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Research Information Center (AFFRIC) and National Agricultural Research Center (NARC). Note that NIAS is a partner of the Generation Challenge Programme (GCP) which is developing semantic and web service integration standards for crop science (see the GCP Pantheon Platform.
Participants
- Hostess for visit: Akane F. Takezaki, Research Coordinator for International Information, AFFRIC (email akane at affrc dot go dot jp)
- Koichi Ohashi, Director, MAFFIN
- Katsuya Okubo, Networking Manager, MAFFIN
- Takuji Kiura, Research, Data Mining and GRID Research Team, National Agricultural Research Center
- Takashi Itoh, NIAS & Rice Annotation Project (RAP)
- Tsuyoshi Tanaka, NIAS & Rice Annotation Project (RAP)
- Shoshi Kikuchi, NIAS and Generation Challenge Programme
- Masaru Takeya, NIAS (Genetic Resources)
- Koji Doi, NIAS and Generation Challenge Programme
- Richard Bruskiewich, IRRI
Ontology Collaboration
- Japanese contributions to Food and Agricultural Organiation (FAO) Agrovoc Agricultural Thesaurus (controlled vocabulary) with Japanese language bindings.
- How to facilitate usage of ontology?
- Share GCP platform support for ontology + multilingual support with Japanese researchers in this area (could be a collaboration through NIAS)?
Web services Wrapping of Japanese Agriculture (mostly Rice) Databases
- For connection to the International Rice Functional Genomics Consortium (IRFGC) rice web services network.
- Answers will be required to the following technical issues:
- what data (types) will be shared from which databases?
- what some of the research "use cases" will be (i.e. services to be implemented)?
- who will specifically be able to contribute technically to the implementation?
- what preferred languages (Perl, Java) will be used to create the web service providers?
- what preferred database access technologies might be used (e.g. for Java (JDBC, Hibernate, or ????)?
- practical issues relating to web service architecture: will there be dedicated server? proxies, firewalls?
- Action: Martin Senger to return to Japan for web services “implementation” visit based on web service use cases to be documented over coming month.
