Fishery Country Profiles Production System (FCPPS)
Introduction
Fishery Country Profiles (FCP) are amongst the most popular information products of the Fishery and Aquaculture Department of FAO. A FCP describes the various facets of the fishery sector in a country. Typically it contains sections on the fishery industries, resources, production, socio-economic performance, management of the sector, legal aspects, etc. Each report is compiled by a group of experts across the globe. The information is often dynamic and difficult to access, such as sector statistics that require aggregations and transformations before they can be published.
With a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) FAO can benefit from a multi-author, flexible work-flow supported reporting environment. This VRE will support FAO’s strategy to improve FCP quality and timeliness through more editorial partnerships.
The FCPPS VRE
FCPPS combines in a single Virtual Research Environment (VRE) editorial, reviewing, and publication processes. Authors collaborate throughout the whole production cycle to ensure stakeholder involvement and guarantee a high quality editing procedure. The D4Science e-Infrastructure provides the editors access to a wealth of information that they can use at each stage of the FCP preparation. The VRE offers FCP authors seamless access to e.g. fishery statistics, and a mapping and GIS environment.
D4Science develops the FCPPS VRE to address specific reporting challenges:
- The Workflow features enable collaborative editing, while also handling user access rights by topic and editorial phase. The VRE also tracks the progress made on all reports, thus leveraging a multi-disciplinary, collaborative, and distributed working environment.
- The Dynamic reporting features include integration of on-line and real-time information sources from other VREs or external data. The VRE can transform on-line fishery statistics into living tables, graphs or other formats.
- The Integration features allow, among others, to format and include images, satellite imagery, text records from selected databases, and information extracted from feeds.
- The Report formatting features allow for the export and publication to a variety of formats.
- The Annotation features permit the authors to add comments and observations to sections of the report, thus providing a depth of additional information, accessible to internal user groups.
