Audio interview

We had an interesting presentation on Tuesday afternoon on the use of a Semantic Wiki Tool to Build a Repository of Reusable Information Objects in Agricultural Education and Extension by Prof. Chatterjee.
He stated that the mass of unstructured information in the field of agriculture is huge and that content is still dispersed without any unified view to integrate the resources. He claimed that the need to extract and re-use these fragments of knowledge was key to improving rural livelihoods. The combination of Web 2.0 tools offer practical solutions to link the floating information scattered into one repository. The challenge is to enable a better organization and navigation of the available content, its localization, customization and delivery to extension workers and educators.

The first originality of the project is that it aims to aggregate content using meanings and concepts rather than using word recognition – which, traditionally, Google and other search engines are doing. But the human mind works by interlinking intuitive concepts. Prof. Chatterjee gave the example of Rome to show that to fully understand a knowledge fragment, it was essential to go further than key words and play with meanings, weaving possibilities. For example, for Chatterjee, Rome equates to FAO and Julius Cesar. But perhaps for you, it means Web2fordev and Coliseum.

On the other hand, the Indian Institute of Technology works with different layers of agricultural knowledge from various sources – academic and institutional sources such as FAO but also tacit content, gathered in a bottom up dynamic from farmers’ communities and through horizontal networks.

Prof. Chatterjee gave the example of the vasat virtual academy for the semi-arid tropics areas. The VASAT is a coalition of experts, rural families and their organizations using various tools such as the Mediawiki semantic tool and FAO Agrovoc, to enhance preparedness to face drought by compiling existing knowledge. VASAT emphasizes creating demand-driven content that can be easily accessed, understood and applied by rural stakeholders. Need-based content thus developed with partners (national and international) is uploaded here. These are then accessed and adapted by local partners, intermediaries and rural farm communities.

The project doesn’t question the traditional way to retrieve and exchange knowledge but does address its limitations (very few farmers indeed benefit from traditional extension services) and highlight the need to complement it by bringing up fragments through digital media. Benefactors of the project should be primarily farmers, leading to better livelihoods; in addition, agricultural knowledge will be boosted and scientists will also benefit.

Eventually, Chatterjee hopes to call for a more global aggregation of agricultural knowledge which would include more international institutions.

Ecouter aussi la réaction de Thierry Doudet, Chef du Départment développement des capacités du CTA

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