Overview

This is just a brief summary of ontology and web service integration discussions between R. Bruskiewich ( IRRI),  National Institute for Agrobiological Sciences (NIAS) and  Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) Information Network (MAFFIN) in Tsukuba (Wed. 13 February 2008). 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.

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.
  • Preliminary answers 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.