The Organic.Lingua team met on the 23rd and 24th of April 2013 in Luxembourg for the second year review of the project by the European Commission. The purpose of such reviews is twofold. Firstly, it was an opportunity for the project partners to present the up-to-date progress of their contributions to the project and outline the key plans for the final year.  Secondly, the EC representatives had a chance to evaluate in detail the project’s achievements since the launch of Organic.Lingua in March 2011.

The reviewers received with positivity and interest the presentations of the team. Particular attention was drawn to the pioneering development of the agricultural ‘ontology’ which allows accurate translation of a huge range of specialist terms into a wide selection of languages. The reviewers were given a preview of the fully functioning Organic.Lingua system in action and helping to accomplish a range of research tasks linked to the Organic.Edunet portal.

The reviewers particularly praised the excellent management of the project and the successful establishment of collaborative links to other projects working in closely related domains. In particular, the ongoing partnership with Open Discovery Space, a pan-European education portal, was praised as having the potential to bring the benefits of the Organic.Lingua solution to tens of thousands of learners. This review confirmed that the Organic.Lingua team has a fruitful and productive second year and are ready to take the project into the final year with exciting developments to unveil to Europe’s agricultural research and learning communities.

New Organic.Lingua “Guiding the evolution of a multilingual ontology in a concrete setting” paper was accepted at the 10^th Extended Semantic Web Conference 2013, which will start in Montpellier, France on May 23rd.  The paper presents a methodology for multilingual ontology evolution and collaboration among different expert roles. Additional information about the ESWC 2013 event can be accessed here.

The 5^th project meeting of the Organic.Lingua consortium was held between 20^th-22^nd of February at the beautiful premises of the University of Alcala in Spain. The project partners discussed the latest developments of the project and provided each other with updates on the technical and user aspects of their work. Discussions focussed principally on the upcoming pilots of the solution where groups of expert users in different countries will be given hands-on access to the latest functionalities of the Organic.Edunet portal which the project has developed. As Organic.Lingua nears the end of its second year, the partners are confident that the project is in good shape to deliver meaningful change and multilingual advantages to the users of this major European portal.

V-3DAS (http://www.v3das.com) is an LLP project, that provides learning content in important fields of the agricultural sector, such as “Multifunctionality”, “Quality, traceability and tracing back of process and product, management and development of an agricultural enterprise”, “Marketing and trade”, sectoral English and agricultural practise in virtual and real farm environment. The V-3DAS training is articulated at four sessions: the classroom, the e-learning and the V-learning session, as well as the apprenticeships. The participating countries of the V-3DAS training were France, Greece, Italy, and Spain. The classroom sessions and the apprenticeships took place at each participating country distinctively, while the e-learning and the V-learning sessions were organized and administrated by Serifo, which is the Italian partner and the coordinator of V-3DAS project.