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About e-GFAR
e-GFAR is the GFAR web space, a “virtual space” where the GFAR community can operate
e-GFAR’s virtual space mimics the physical GFAR space for discussion and action on ARD
How to:
1) Publish your own pages on the e-GFAR Open Site
Go to "Have your say" > "Your Open Site" and log in. Once logged in, when navigating the Open Site, buttons and links will allow you to edit existing contents or add new contents in the category of your choice.
2) Having your news / events published on the e-GFAR News pages
There are two ways to do this:
a) Send us the url of your RSS feed: external feeds are read in real time on e-GFAR and shown on the following pages: News, Events, Job opportunities.
b) Add your news item / event to the Open Site, in the News and Events section. All contents published under this section and its sub-sections (News, Events, Job opportunities) are automatically shown on the EGFAR News pages.
3) Participate in an existing forum or ask for a new public or private forum
Go to "Have your say" > "Your Forums" and log in. Once logged in, the forums homepage will appear.
We want to host forums that are needed and used by the ARD community, so please use the link on the Forums page to ask for new forums, either public or restricted to selected participants.
4) Search for documents
a) GFAR documents
Go to "The gateway to knowledge" > "Publications area".
Advanced Search: this engine allows you to search by title, year, type of document and subject (based on a specially developed classification, also mapped to Agrovoc for compliance with existing and widely accepted standards).
Special documents sets: this page lists ready-made searches for relevant types of documents (Annual Reports, Conferences proceedings etc.)
Our repository is managed through an EIMS module provided by Waicent (FAO) and supports exports to the Agris AP format (we are an Agris Center).
Soon, our repository will join the Open Archive Initiative and the new Agris Open Access project.
b) Documents from ARD-related websites
Go to "The gateway to knowledge" > "ARD Web Ring Gateway" > "ARD Search Engines" > "Search for documents".
This engine searches only selected websites (our “web ring”) and when the results appear you can still narrow your search by clicking on the corresponding tab (each tab narrows the search to a certain category of websites).
5) Search for Organizations
Go to "The gateway to knowledge" > "ARD Web Ring Gateway" > "ARD Search Engines" > "Search for institutions".
This engine allows you to search by name, region, country and “domain” (based mostly on the stakeholder group according to a terminology widely accepted among the GFAR community).
At the moment this engine searches for organizations in the GFAR database and in the EARD / Infosys+ database of european organizations. As soon as interoperability protocols are implemented with our partner information systems, a “Web Ring” of relevant databases will be searched and other domains (projects, project outputs and experts) will be covered.
Important collaborations with partner organizations (FAO, Wageningen International, Infosys, CTA and the main Regional Agricultural Information Systems) are going on in order to set up a coherent platform for sharing reliable and updated information.
6) Search for contents in partner websites
Go to "The gateway to knowledge" > "ARD Web Ring Gateway" > "ARD Search Engines" > "Search for web pages".
Type the word(s) to search for (use the same syntax as for Google searches).
This engine searches only selected websites (our “web ring”) and when the results appear you can still narrow your search by clicking on the corresponding tab (each tab narrows the search to a certain category of websites).
This engine is based on a new service powered by Google (Google Custom Search Engine).
7) Exploit our RSS feeds
Go to "News, jobs, events" > "Keep informed".
On this page you will find the urls of our News and Events RSS feeds: you can read them through your favourite RSS aggregator (for a list, see here) or you can publish them on your website using a simple stylesheet.
Technical support for this and other technology issues will be soon available on the website.
The vision
The re-design of EGFAR is intended to comply fully with the original objectives of EGFAR and to enhance some of the key concepts of its original vision by exploiting new ICTs.
EGFAR was conceived as a tool to fulfill the need for a communication platform to exchange experiences, information and knowledge among all stakeholders involved in ARD.
EGFAR’s general objectives since the beginning have been: 1) to provide an interactive communication system among the stakeholders of ARD; 2) to provide information resources relevant to ARD and enhance access to them, thus providing “gateway (portal) functions”; to build and allow access to “knowledge pools” built through collaborative efforts among stakeholders in a few high priority areas identified by them.
The key concepts defined since the beginning and now enhanced by the new EGFAR are:
> decentralization
> subsidiarity
- EGFAR should be a stakeholder-led system with decentralized management: the Collaborative Website Wiki impemements this concept;
- EGFAR should implement gateway functions (searches, directories) to distributed resources rather than host and maintain local databases
> communication platform
- My EGFAR implements the Community functions of EGFAR
> enhancement of access to information resources
- information (“paths” to information) should be “tailored” to meet the needs of stakeholder groups and individual stakeholders through the development of specific taxonomies and search strategies: the GFAR taxonomy and the ARD Custom Search provide tailored paths to information;
- EGFAR has to promote standards (and use those already available) to be shared by the various stakeholders in order to facilitate the integration of information resources: EGFAR uses standards (XML, agricultural-specific metadata sets, standard-compliant software) and GFAR participates in projects for the development and promotion of new metadata sets.
“Converting information into knowledge
that is useful for different end-users and stakeholders,
and facilitating access to it”
Technical features
1) Framework and Model
EGFAR has been built using a Content Management System (CMS) based on the MVC (Model-View-Controller) model and accompanied by a powerful API
The CMS we use is InfoGlue and you can find a list of its major features here.
We have integrated our in-house programming directly in the CMS: InfoGlue allows for any type of contents to be managed, also JSP scripts that are loaded and executed in the web pages.
2) Environment and language
InfoGlue can be installed on any J2EE servlet engine: we use Tomcat 5.5.20 on a Linux machine.
InfoGlue is written in Java and uses both JSP (and JSP custom tags) and Apache Velocity as template scripting languages.
Our in-house programming modules are also written in Java and / or JSP.
InfoGlue can use several database engines: we use MySql 5.0.
3) Information management
- Content management
InfoGlue uses XML schemas to define content types and XML records to store contents in the database. Compliance with JSR-170 is taken into consideration for future releases.
- Document management
GFAR’s documents are stored and catalogued using the Waicent (FAO) EIMS (Electronic Information Management System) software: the EIMS metadata format is Dublin Core compliant and produces XML outputs filtered according to parameters. This feature is exploited by the search and browse functionalities implemented in the website using Java Xalan-based transformations and XSLT stylesheets.
Our repository has also an Agris AP compliant XML export. Agris AP is an Application Profile (a metadata format) created specifically for document-like objects in the agricultural field.
- Databases and information exchange
EGFAR interfaces the GFAR database of agricultural research institutions, a data bank of about 2000 institutions stored in an Oracle database, and a relevant subset of this database with a broad coverage of Farmers Organizations (called the FODABASE). The interface is realized in JSP through the JDBC Oracle driver.
With a view to information sharing and the necessary coherence in information management, EGFAR provides an XML output of these data, compliant with the Organizations AP. This XML output is available through a REST call and allows for some input parameters.
EGFAR also implements parsing and XSLT formatting of XML sources (preferably compliant with agricultural information management standards) made available by agricultural information systems. At present, the Infosys+ and the Wisard databases of institutions are accessed in this way.
- Syndication
EGFAR can export all contents as RSS feeds. Our feeds are in the RSS 2.0 format and validate against a very strict RSS validator .
EGFAR also aggregates news and events information from RSS feeds through an open source JSP taglib .
4) Additional software components
- Forums: we use JForum
- Document management: we store and catalogue our documents using an EIMS module provided by Waicent (FAO). The cataloguing module has not been integrated in the CMS, but searches are implemented in the website using JSP and XSLT stylesheets.
Last updated on:
Fri Mar 13 12:00:56 CET 2009
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