Opening access to agricultural information in Ghana Kenya…
Opening access to agricultural information in Ghana, Kenya and Zambia :
« Agricultural innovation systems in Africa need to have access to both local and global agricultural sciences and technical information if they are to have an impact on agriculture and food security initiatives on the continent. While access to global agricultural information resources and innovations is relatively easy, local agricultural content is generally not visible and easily accessible. Providing access these important resources, through institutional repositories of metadata records and associated full-text documents, is one pathway of ensuring that the content generated locally is easily accessible within the country, region and around the globe. This paper highlights three initiatives implemented by national research institutes in Ghana, Kenya and Zambia aimed at opening access to agricultural information and knowledge resources. It also presents the major challenges faced in the implementation of the initiatives and the key lessons learned that could be useful when implementing similar initiatives. »
URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18921/
A Two-Dimensional Approach to Evaluate the Scientific Production of Countries (Case Study: The Basic Sciences)
The quantity and quality of scientific output of the topmost 50 countries in the four basic sciences (agricultural and biological sciences, chemistry, mathematics, and physics and astronomy) are studied in the period of the recent 12 years (1996-2007). In order to rank the countries, a novel two-dimensional method is proposed, which is inspired by the H-index and other methods based on quality and quantity measures.
The countries data are represented in a « quantity-quality diagram », and partitioned by a conventional statistical algorithm (k-means), into three clusters, members of which are rather the same in all of the basic sciences. The results offer a new perspective on the global positions of countries with regards to their scientific output.
Information and Computation
In this chapter, concepts related to information and computation are reviewed in the context of human computation. A brief introduction to information theory and different types of computation is given. Two examples of human computation systems, online social networks and Wikipedia, are used to illustrate how these can be described and compared in terms of information and computation.
Research Data Symposium
Research Data Symposium Panel 1: Plan and Collect
Research Data Symposium Panel 2: Assure, Describe, and Preserve
Research Data Symposium Panel 3: Integrate and Analyze
Research Data Symposium Panel 4: Discover, Share, and Impact