Fisheries Country Profiles Production System (FCPPS)
The Fisheries Country Profiles Production System community is a group of FAO Fisheries services and national experts working to streamline the production of country profiles in order to cover more countries, update profiles more frequently, using more data sources, and create them in more languages. Although country profiles are one of the most popular FAO information products, they are cumbersome to assemble. They rely on many data sources and content authors. A Virtual Research Environment (VRE) has been created in the D4Science e-Infrastructure to support the FCPPS community. This VRE combines different data sources into a single environment, thus simplifying the report generation. Through this VRE National experts will upload their fisheries and stock inventories together with other authorial content. FAO time-series statistics will be accessible and used by FAO's Fisheries Resources service to produce assessments. A coordinator will combine these outputs together with other VRE data such as FAOLEX (regulations), FAOSTAT (statistics) and Electronic Information Management Services (EIMS publications) to produce final reports.
A number of collaborations, with different teams in FAO, have been established with projects/initiatives/working groups which cooperate with the FCPPS community. The most significant are briefly presented below.
- FIE – Fisheries and Aquaculture Economics and Policy Division. This group controls the production of country profiles. Several meetings have been held beginning in February 2008. The division director has given formal support to the FCPPS prototype, and if successful it will become the department’s chosen vehicle for the production of these profiles.
- FIM – Fisheries and Aquaculture Management Division. This group produces assessments on the state of stocks and fisheries based on the available data. This information provides a vital snapshot of the relative health of a countries fisheries and fish stocks. They also have agreed to participate in the prototype by using it as part of their assessment process. Several meetings have been held with the responsible members of this group beginning of February 2008.
- FIES – Fisheries and Aquaculture Information and Statistics Service. This group collects, maintains and disseminates over 50 years of fisheries statistics on capture, production, fleets and commodities. They have agreed to participate in the prototype and add needed web services in order to ease access to their time-series data. The service chief has given his formal support to the prototype.
- LEGN – FAO Legal Department. This group maintains an important database of national and regional legal regulations pertaining to fisheries, forestries, agriculture and livestock. These regulations as well as associated port-state measures, a new initiative to combat illegal fishing will be ported into FCPPS. They have agreed to allow programmatic access to their data.
- KCEW – Knowledge Exchange and Capacity Building Division. This group manages the Corporate Document Repository that will be ported to FCPPS. It contains numerous titles specific to countries or regions covered by the country profiles and constitutes an integral source of data used by editors in constructing reports. This group is working on corporate-level country profiles. Several meetings have taken place since March 2008 to define how data sharing can take place between the groups using D4Science technology.
Submitted by SiteAdminUser on Wed, 19/11/2008 - 17:37
