Overview

This is just a brief summary of ontology and web service integration discussions between R. Bruskiewich ( IRRI),  National Institute for Agrobiological Sciences (NIAS),  Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) Information Network (MAFFIN) and the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Research Information Center (AFFRIC) 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.