AgLRs in Budapest

Last week, IE members Alberto Abián, Elena Mena and Raquel Rebollo were attending to the Technical Course on Federation of Learning Repositories for Agriculture, Food & Environment (AgLRs) which took place at FAO Sub-regional Office for Central and Eastern Europe (SEUR) in Budapest.

The main task for the IE members in this course was to learn about spcecific architectures to interconnect Learning Repositories and to expain the technology behind the Organic.Edunet Web Portal.

Alberto, Raquel and Elena in cold Budapest - Nov.2009

 

Organic.Edunet 6th project meeting in Rome

IE members Alberto Abian and Salvador Sanchez are currently in Rome to attend to the Organic.Edunet 6th project meeting which is taking place in the FAO premises in the city. Main task for IE in this meeting is to introduce the first fully functional version of the Organic.Edunet portal. IE members are also participanting in other sessions related to the evaluation of the quality of the learning objects uploaded to the portal, pilot trials requirements, multilingual issues in the portal, and others.

The Roman Coliseum

On the social side, the eternal city of Rome needs no presentation. In fact the sessions take up almost all the available time so it is difficult to do any touristic activity apart from the joint dinners we are all having after everyday’s sessions. In the photo below, one view of today’s session about the basics of the evaluation plan.

General view of one of the sessions

 

Ontology workshop at FAO

After a very fast taxi course from the Fumicino airport to the center of Rome, IE members Alberto Abian and Salvador Sanchez-Alonso reached the FAO premises where they organized the a workshop about the Organic Ontology created for the Organic.Edunet project. It has been a very good opportunity to look closer at what we have been doing during the last 6 months and to improve the current Organic Agriculture and Agreoecology ontology with the help of a bunc of experts from the Organic.Edunet consortium and from FAO. An important part of the meeting was devoted to the presentation of the Moki tool, aimed at easing the collaborative creation and improvement of ontologies. This tool has been created as part of the Aposdle project, whose representative Marco Rospocher participated in the ontology workshop.

In the photo below, UAH members with other participants in the workshop posing in the Philippines room at the FAO building.

From left to right: Nikos Palavitsinis, Alberto Abian, Marco Rospocher and Salvador Sanchez

 

SSFW09

Last week, IE member Leonardo Lezcano attended the SSFW09 workshop, held in Milan, where he presented an approach titled “Integrating Disease And Diagnosis Semantics In Clinical Archetypes”. This workshop was a follow up to the first workshop on Signs, Symptoms and Findings: Towards an Ontology for Clinical Phenotypes held in Dallas in 2008. The aim of both meetings was to achieve a better understanding of the pathogenesis of human disease in order to develop effective diagnostic, therapeutic and prevention strategies. This Milan edition was organized by the DISCo Bioinformatics Group at the University of Milano-Bicocca.
The workshop audience was pleased to watch the presentation of Nicola Guarino, one of the key names in the ontologies domain, as well as the one of Barry Smith, perhaps the most vociferous advocate of the philosophical approach to the study of ontologies in informatics.

SSFW09 participants

From left to right: Leonardo Lezcano, Gianluca Colombo, Daniele Merico

 

IE members meet Richard Messnarz

This week Dr. Richard Messnarz, executive director of ISCN, visited Alcalá de Henares to attend to Eurospi 2009. IE group was contacted by some members of ISCN to explore paths for collaboration in the framework of the Knowledge Partnership program for Process Improvement that ISCN is carrying out, but also  to exchange ideas on future joint proposals for EU funded projects. Richard and the rest of the people we met were very nice and kind, and very keen to start a collaboration with our group, by the way. In the photo below, chairmen of EuroSPI and IE members Miguel Angel and Salvador sharing table and some friendly conversation in El pollo de Alcala, where we had lunch together.

From left to right: Miklos Biro, Kerstin Siakas, Miguel Angel Sicilia, Salvador Sanchez-Alonso and Richard Messnarz.

 

Organic.Edunet 5th project meeting in Norway

Today and the next two days IE members Alberto Abian and Salvador Sanchez will be in Asker, a town near Oslo, in Norway, to attend to the Organic.Edunet 5th project meeting. Main task for IE in this meeting is to show the rest of the partners a portal mock-up presentation including general interface, semantic navigation and social navigation. IE members will also conduct an interactive session where all partners will comment on the portal mock up and give feedback to UAH for continuing with the development work.

On the social side, the meeting is taking place at Holmen FjordHotel, a beautiful location by the Oslo Fjord. Meeting rooms face the Fjord, as well as the restaurant and many of the rooms, which makes of it a nice place to work and relax once meetings have been called off.

In the image above, Alberto, project manager Nikos Manouselis, Salvador and host Aage Steen in the hotel pier relaxing in between sessions.

 

Open health Spain 2009

Yesterday and today the first Open Health Spain symposium on clinical interoperability issues is taking place in Alcala. Organized by the IE, ATOS Research and Innovation and the Fuenlabrada University Hospital, this symposium aims at gathering together researchers and practitioners in the field of Health interoperability in Spain.

Pablo Serrano (Fuenlabrada Univ. Hospital), Josema Cavanillas (ATOS R&I) and Miguel A. Sicilia (Univ. of Alcala) in the first session

 

Organic.Edunet meeting in Alcala

From today to friday afternoon Alcala de Henares will host the sessions of the 4th EU project Organic.Edunet meeting. The workins sessions will take place in the old Rectorate building, an amazing and very inspiring place to meet and work. These walls, built in the XVIth century, contemplated the student period of literature genious and other important personalities such as Juan de la Cruz, Lope de Vega or Francisco de Quevedo, just to name a few.

Interactive session in the 3M room of the rectorate building, part of the first day agenda

After a long day of work, we all had a few tapas at night in the old-style bars in Alcala (photo by Hannes E.)

 

Green flag and… goodbye Athens!

The review went perfect! The outcome of our 1st project review was very positive, and the project was highly appreciated by the project reviewers and the Commission.The result was a nice green flag from the Commission to continue with the activities as planned.

Some partners visited the Acropolis after the review, which was empty due to the stormy weather in Athens

In the following days we will finally decide about the next project meeting, that is expected to take place late January or early February, most probably in our university.

 

Organic.Edunet first review meeting

Tomorrow the first year review of the Organic.Edunet project will take place in Athens. The project officer and other 2 expert evaluators from the EU Commission will check whether we delivered what we promised or not, whether we are on track or not and the level of accomplishment of the project objectives after the first year.

IE members Miguel Angel and Salvador are in Athens for the meeting and for the preliminary internal preparations of the consortium partners. However, Miguel who only came to Athens for the preliminary sessions, is in fact stuck in the airport in this very moment climbing up the walls the spiderman way: His flight back to Madrid, scheduled for this morning at 7:30 is still in Athens (now it is 18:00 local time).

EA pupils proudly showing their organic garden

The rest of the partners, including Salvador, visited this morning the EA premises to show the project officer in which manner the project will be useful for pupils in the lower levels of the educational level. In the snapshots, two moments of the visit to the organic garden the students run in EA.

The project officer listens to the explanations about the use of the organic garden in transversal education at EA