LifeWatch ERIC Receives Recognition from Agricultural Minister for its work in the Agroecology sector

Agroecology

LifeWatch ERIC’s participation in the Smart Agrifood Summit, Europe’s largest agrifood innovation and digitisation event, marked this year a cornerstone for the Infrastructure’s involvement in agroecology initiatives.

On Friday 30 September, LifeWatch ERIC CTO, Juan Miguel González-Aranda, alongside José Emilio Guerrero (professor at the University of Cordoba, member of Common Agricultural Policy Ministerial Advisory Committee, and LifeWatch ERIC collaborator) were delighted to welcome the Spanish Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Luis Planas, to the Infrastructure’s booth. A fruitful meeting focusing on the contribution that LifeWatch ERIC makes to the agroecology sector, during which the Minister appreciated how LifeWatch ERIC’s projects are paving the way and leading efforts towards the valorisation of ecosystem services and agriculture ecological sustainability, becoming a reference point for other Mediterranean countries and Europe as a whole.

Dr González-Aranda made the following comment: “I am honoured to have welcomed the Minister to our booth. This is an important acknowledgment of LifeWatch ERIC’s effort in this field, critical for human wellbeing, and it is an incentive to further advance our engagement in agroecology.”

For more information on the Smart Agrifood Summit, click here.

Semantic Synergies at the OntoPortal Alliance Workshop

OntoPortal Alliance Workshop

At the end of September, members of the team from LifeWatch ERIC and LifeWatch Italy were in Montpellier, France, for the OntoPortal Alliance Workshop. The OntoPortal Alliance is a consortium of research and infrastructure teams (and one SME) dedicated to promoting semantic and ontology services—in science and more—based on the open, collaboratively developed OntoPortal open-source software. Teams in the Alliance develop and maintain several openly accessible semantic resource repositories. This includes BioPortal, the primary and historical source of OntoPortal code, but also AgroPortal, EcoPortal, MedPortal and MatPortal.

The 2022 OntoPortal Alliance Workshop’s main goal was to consolidate the OntoPortal Alliance organisation and shared agenda. External parties interested in re-using and/or participating to the development of OntoPortal, or more generally interested in the management of ontologies and other types of semantic resources (terminologies, vocabularies, thesauri, etc.) were also welcome at the event, which included an open tutorial on “Setting up your appliance” (for condensed technical information on how to quickly deploy your own ontology repository). 

During the session, the representatives from the anthologies repositories discussed how they plan to use the ontology repositories provided by the alliance. Nicola Fiore, Xeni Kechagioglou (LifeWatch ERIC) and laria Rosati (LifeWatch Italy) presented EcoPortal, the repository of semantic resources developed by LifeWatch ERIC and co-managed with the Italian national node, to brainstorm its next evolution together with the alliance partners. Such synergies are fundamental to ensuring the coordination of the development of semantic resources for scientific research.