Many EU and nationally funded research projects in the fields of agriculture and forestry provide excellent results, but the outreach and translation of these results into field practices is limited. The overall aim of VALERIE is to boost the outreach of research by facilitating the integration into innovative field practices. The work in VALERIE consists of three major approaches. (1). Stakeholder-driven approach. Ten case studies set the central stage for the bottom-up approach of the project, aided by highly effective tools of web semantics and ontology. Cases are centred around a specific supply-chain, a farming sector or a landscape. The stakeholder communities (SHC) represent the natural networks engaged in innovation. They drive the process of articulating innovation needs, enabling the retrieval of precisely matching knowledge and solutions, and evaluating their potential in the local context. (2) Theme-driven approach. VALERIE retains six thematic domains that are at the heart of sustainable production and resource use. These six provide the back-bone for structuring the annotation and summarising activities, which in turn will provide a vast body of knowledge accessible via the Communication Facility (CF). (3) Knowledge disclosure. VALERIE will launch a `Communication Facility¿ (CF) for the EIP-Networking Facility. The CF supports communication amongst actors in the field and researchers. Next, it injects new knowledge into the innovation process, by enabling users to retrieve highly relevant (tailored-to-needs) information, based on their own vocabularies. In offering tools for communication, as well as content structured for efficient knowledge retrieval, the CF fuses the advantages typical of `learning networks¿ and `linear¿ modes of knowledge sharing. The CF will be set up, tested and integrated into the EIP-NF platform, as a generic infrastructure for use by `fresh¿ stakeholder communities, also beyond the life of the VALERIE project.
Many EU and nationally funded research projects in the fields of agriculture and forestry provide excellent results, but the outreach and translation of these results into field practices is limited. The overall aim of VALERIE is to boost the outreach of research by facilitating the integration into innovative field practices. The work in VALERIE consists of three major approaches. (1). Stakeholder-driven approach. Ten case studies set the central stage for the bottom-up approach of the project, aided by highly effective tools of web semantics and ontology. Cases are centred around a specific supply-chain, a farming sector or a landscape. The stakeholder communities (SHC) represent the natural networks engaged in innovation. They drive the process of articulating innovation needs, enabling the retrieval of precisely matching knowledge and solutions, and evaluating their potential in the local context. (2) Theme-driven approach. VALERIE retains six thematic domains that are at the heart of sustainable production and resource use. These six provide the back-bone for structuring the annotation and summarising activities, which in turn will provide a vast body of knowledge accessible via the Communication Facility (CF). (3) Knowledge disclosure. VALERIE will launch a `Communication Facility¿ (CF) for the EIP-Networking Facility. The CF supports communication amongst actors in the field and researchers. Next, it injects new knowledge into the innovation process, by enabling users to retrieve highly relevant (tailored-to-needs) information, based on their own vocabularies. In offering tools for communication, as well as content structured for efficient knowledge retrieval, the CF fuses the advantages typical of `learning networks¿ and `linear¿ modes of knowledge sharing. The CF will be set up, tested and integrated into the EIP-NF platform, as a generic infrastructure for use by `fresh¿ stakeholder communities, also beyond the life of the VALERIE project.