CABI contributed to an Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) Symposium on Agricultural Science Data Sharing and Service which brought together over 30 participants from 15 countries within APEC and other national and international organisations at a meeting in Beijing.
The aim of the symposium was to enhance mutual understanding on the status of agricultural science data sharing in APEC members; exchange experiences and lessons on science and technology resources sharing; and discuss technology frameworks for agricultural data sharing in agriculture.
The event, which was held from December 7-9, 2017 was organised by the Agricultural Information Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (AII-CAAS) and funded by the China-APEC Co-operation Fund of the Chinese Ministry of Finance.
CABI delivered a keynote presentation at the first formal session on sharing knowledge and experiences in data management. Many of the experts attending were from CABI member countries, such as Bangladesh, Chile, China, Malaysia, Philippines, Pakistan and Vietnam.
Dr Qiaoqiao Zhang, Director of Memberships, CABI (also a current guest professor at AII-CAAS since 1997), talked about how open data and data sharing can contribute to the realisation of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. She highlighted the positive social impacts produced by global initiatives and programmes like the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN), CABI's Plantwise, CABI's Pest Risk Information Service (PRISE) and some Open Research Initiatives. Dr Zhang noted that during the first High Level Political Forum of the UN in 2016, governments welcomed the proposal on 'enhancing national capacities for evidence-based and data-driven decision-making', and called for 'further building and strengthening capacities for data collection, disaggregation, dissemination and analysis at all levels.'
Andrew Benton, Manager, Agri-Tech in China Newton Network, CABI & Rothamsted Research, also contributed to the Symposium by making a short presentation on the Agri-Tech in China Newton Network, as an example of a bilateral collaboration programme that fosters and supports data-enabled innovation in the Agri-Tech field. He highlighted how the Network is developing to include many big data and satellite-based GIS agencies in both the UK and China, and how it is helping them develop joint farm-level technologies to solve agricultural production and food sustainability problems that affect both countries.
The Symposium ended with the call for building an APEC Agricultural Data Union by AII-CAAS, which has offered to provide operational and technical support to this Union.
Brought to you by Scope e-Knowledge Center, a trusted global partner for digital content transformation solutions - Abstracting & Indexing (A&I), Knowledge Modeling (Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies), and Metadata Enrichment & Entity Extraction.
