No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Researchers, governments, agencies, food producers and the civil society are increasingly concerned about ‘emerging food risks’. It is recognised that the successful identification of emerging risks is at the heart of protecting public health and the environment, and that this requires worldwide cooperation between all parties involved in the food supply chain. The objectives and research proposed in the DEMETER project are designed to support current (and future) EFSA procedures for emerging issue and risks identification, providing a community resource that will allow EFSA and EU Member State authorities to share data, data mining knowledge and methods in a rapid and effective manner. A prototype technical Platform called the Emerging Risks Knowledge Exchange Platform (ERKEP) will be developed by DEMETER. The ‘Concept Note’ is a vison document on a framework of Emerging Risk Knowledge Exchange in which ERKEP is embedded in – but goes beyond the ERKE platform. Outlined in this document are: definitions of relevant concepts in the context of emerging issues and risks identification; who are the contributors, users and stakeholders of ERKEP; what are the identified end‐user needs, how could the ERKEP Framework contribute to meeting these needs; what types of knowledge, data, and methods do they share; and how can a technical solution be implemented to support these activities.

A B S T R A C TThe challenge of the work presented here is to make innovative research output in the agronomy and forestry domain accessible to end-users, so that it can be practically applied. We have developed an approach that consists of three key-elements: an ontology with domain knowledge, a set of documents that have been annotated and metaannotated, and a system (ask-Valerie) that is based on a dialogue to represent the interaction between end user and system. We show that the dialogue-metaphor is a good way of modelling the interaction between user and system. The system helps the user in formulating his question and in answering it in a useful way. Meta-annotations of key-paragraphs in the document-base turn out to be relevant in assessing in one glance what the content of a document is. End-users are very enthusiastic about the possibilities that ask-Valerie offers them in translating scientific results to their own situation.