=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1152/paper62
|storemode=property
|title=Applications of Informatics In a Leonardo da Vinci Project with Reference to the Organic Farming In Greece and Europe
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1152/paper62.pdf
|volume=Vol-1152
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/haicta/GousiosTVT11
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==Applications of Informatics In a Leonardo da Vinci Project with Reference to the Organic Farming In Greece and Europe==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1152/paper62.pdf
Applications of Informatics in a Leonardo da Vinci
project with reference to the organic farming in Greece
and Europe
Vissarion Gousios1, Athanasia Tziortziou2, George Vlontzos1,
Stergios Tzortzios1
1
Department of Agriculture, Crop Production and Rural Environment, University of Thessaly,
Greece, email: vgousios@uth.gr, gvlontzos@uth.gr, stzortz@uth.gr
2
Department of Food Technology, Technological Educational Institute of Larisa, Greece,
email: tziortziou@teilar.gr
Abstract: The market of organic products in Europe is generally expanding.
The organic food production has been strictly regulated in the European
Union. Particular competence requirements need to be developed not only to
achieve economic production while ensuring compliance with the regulations,
but also new knowledge, skills and competences are required for the organic
food retailers in the field of certification, accreditation regulations, licensing,
etc. The highly successful LDV project “EcoQualify II - Dissemination and
implementation of a quality assurance system for further education in organic
retail trade in Europe” has anticipated this development in 2007 and created a
comprehensive EUROPEAN QUALITY ASSURANCE SYSTEM for the
further education in organic foods trade. EcoQualify III plans to transfer this
successful project into four states that have not benefitted from the original
project. Major role in the project, as the “transfer of innovation” term
suggests, has the applied in EcoQualify III informatic tools, which are
described in this paper.
Keywords: Transfer of innovation, Assurance, Quality, Informatics
1. Introduction
The Organic agriculture constitutes important parameter for the sustainable
agriculture in Greece and Europe. Many studies have been presented to this direction
(Lohr, 1998; Raynolds, 2000; Scialabba, 2000; Giannakas, 2002; Morgan et al.,
2000; Rigby et al., 2003; Badgley et al., 2007). Organic agriculture has its roots at
the beginning of the 1980s. However, the major change was brought about with the
application of EU-Regulation 2092/91, in 1993 in the country, while a second
________________________________
Copyright ©by the paper’s authors. Copying permitted only for private and academic purposes.
In: M. Salampasis, A. Matopoulos (eds.): Proceedings of the International Conference on Information
and Communication Technologies
for Sustainable Agri-production and Environment (HAICTA 2011), Skiathos, 8-11 September, 2011.
727
expansion took place after the adoption of EU-Regulation 2078/92 in 1996 in
Greece. At the moment, in Greece, 2.798.946 str. of land is organically cultivated
while 1.521.175 of them are pasture lands (Greek Ministry of Agriculture, 2007).
The starting point for the E(co)-Qualify I initiative was the realization that the
situation in training in organic retail was very confusing and the quality of offers
very mixed.
In Eco-Qualify I, European qualification standards and web-based training
have been developed for the further training in organic food trade. Qualification
standards have been developed for the operating level and for company
management and provide a basis for transparent systems of evaluation and
certification. These Standards promoted the mutual adaptation of various national
educational measures within professional education.
The certificates awarded in accordance with these qualification standards are
comparable throughout Europe. The professional standard of employees in special
organic food stores can be supported and assessed with the help of qualification
standards. Owners as well as employees of organic food shops can acquire
certificates in several areas. This ensures a uniform standard for the individual staff
and shops involved.
In Eco-Qualify II, the qualification standards developed in the former project
Eco-Qualify I, were developed to a comprehensive European quality assurance
system for the further education in organic foods trade and transferred into the
participating partner countries Austria, Italy, Netherlands, Czech Republic and
Germany.
Based on the E(co)-Qualify qualification standards focusing on technical
content of the organic retail, the E(co)-Qualify II project develops European quality
assurance system for educators. In order to develop a comprehensive Quality
Assurance System, various indicators and criteria for the implementation of training
measures have been included.
The intention of the introduction of a European Quality Assurance System
was to offer education on the same high level with international comparable criteria
and a controllable framework in the EU member states.
2 Materials and methods
In the third project phase, in E(co)- Qualify III, the Quality Assurance
System is being transferred into states that have not benefited from the original
project (Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey). The existing knowledge from
E(co)- Qualify II is crucial for the adaptation and testing of the Quality Assurance
System (QAS) at the national level and modification and adaptation of the QAS for
the national needs and conditions in the new countries.
The project’s objectives are:
1) Transfer and implementation of the QAS in the practice of educational
institutions (universities, colleges, vocational training centers, etc.) and
retailers/farmers in the receiver countries and
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2) Adaptation and testing of the Quality Assurance System (QAS) at the
national level and modification and adaptation of the QAS for the national
needs and conditions.
Besides, the main products of the Eco-Qualify III are: the European
Assurance System for Further Education in Organic Food Trade; Licensing
Guidelines; Quality Handbook, National quality assurance systems for further
education in natural food trade in the four partner countries.
The key phases of the project are:
1. Project management and administration
2. Framework analysis
3. Adaptation of Quality Assurance System for training in organic foods
retailing to the national requirements.
4. Testing of the quality assurance system in Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and
Turkey
5. Creating the final version of the QAS
6. Dissemination and Valorisation
7. Evaluation
Major role in our project, as the “transfer of innovation” term suggests, has
the applied in EcoQualify III informatic tools. Some of these are presented below.
Website
A website dedicated to the Eco-Qualify III Project has been created and made
available to the public. The address of the website is: http://ECOqualifyIII.
uth.cs.teilar.gr . The following figure (fig.1) shows a snapshot of the website:
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Fig. 1. Snapshot of the website
The website allows easy access and communication between the partners and
also allows progress on work-packages or individual tasks to be reviewed and
monitored. The system supports proactive management and communication through
e-mail. The website also contains two main parts: the “Public Part”, accessible to
every reader/visitor, and the “Collaboration tools” which can be accessed by the
project members only.
The “Public Part” presents the general information on the project and will
present the project main achievements in the future.
The public part of the website is divided into several sections. The “Project”
section has the following subsections: “Summary of the Project”, “Project
Objectives”, “Consortium - Partners”, “Target Groups”, “Results”, “Products” and
“Partner meetings”.
The subsection “Results” will present short announcements of the major
achievements of the consortium at the stage when they can be made public. The
“Project Management Board” section gives a short presentation of each of the
recipients, including the contact information. There is also the «News” section,
where announcements related to the project are being presented.
A visitor counter TOOL was installed on the website in order to follow the
visitor traffic (fig. 2).
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Fig. 2. Visitor tool in the website
The “Collaboration tools” section is a private section. A visitor to this section
needs to login using unique username and password. The “Collaboration tools”
section is dedicated for maintaining a record of the project documents and exchange
ideas with other members in the forum subsection.
The “Collaboration tools” section has four sub-sections (“Forum”, Files”,
“Pad” and “Members”), which help partners to discuss topics, exchange ideas and
valuable suggestions. The members can upload files to the public server using the
web file manager which gives full administrative options. For the convenience of the
internal users, the public storage can be accessed using the DropBox file transfer
tool. Furthermore, the “Collaboration tools” section is integrated with Google
EtherPad project and offers a web-based real-time collaborative document editor and
live chat.
Links of the ECO-QUALIFY III project have been created in
http://ecoqualify.at.o-r-a.org/ and http://www.equalita.de/cmsen/, the two formal
sites of ECO-QUALIFY projects.
The website will be updated in order to promote EcoQualify III project, its
objectives, activities, target groups, partners and results. The project web-site will be
maintained at least five years after the end of the project, until 2017.
ADAM portal
ADAM (Advanced Data Archive and Management system) is a new project
and product portal for the Leonardo da Vinci programme. The ADAM database is
proper for current Leonardo promoters to showcase their projects, and for anyone
who wants to view the innovative project work funded by the Leonardo programme.
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Completed products from the projects can be uploaded in ADAM in a variety
of formats and can be viewed by many different organizations across Europe. This is
a simple and cost effective way of sharing project materials with a wide audience
and make links with European organizations for future working.
The ADAM application is multilingual, and can in principle display the
information in any language. Currently all functions are available in English,
German and French.
An important functionality of ADAM database is the “Product and Project
Search” which is intended to enable users to find relevant projects or products
quickly. Two types of search are available, a simple and an extended search. For
both types of searches, the user can select whether he wants to see a list of products
or a list of projects as a result of the search. In the header of the result list on the
right side a link (‘search for products’ or ‘search for projects’) is added that allows
to repeat the same search for products if currently projects are shown, and vice
versa:
ADAM has been used from LDV Project team to make the Eco-Qualify III
project available to the scientific community as well as to disseminate its results.
Project users must register themselves, before they can create and edit a
project. In this case the user specific information (last viewed projects, bookmarked
projects, language and
preferred homepage) is stored in the ADAM Portal. Basic informations of the
Projects available in ADAM are: Title of the Project (Project number, year), Status
of the Project, The marketing text, The summary of the Project, Description of the
Project, Product Informations, Project homepage, Project Contractor, Coordinator of
the Project and Contact Person, Partners participating in the Project, Events relative
to the Project, Project Themes, Project Sectors.
The ADAM portal has also a field named “files” where everyone interested
in the Project can download files relative to this.
A useful tool in ADAM is the “similar projects” tool which in our case
appears Eco-qualify II and other Projects similar to our Project. Other tools in
ADAM are the “Recommend Project” , “Bookmark Project” and “Print Project”
which give viewers the corresponding choices. Especially, the last one prints the
project in .pdf form.
A snapshot image of our project “Implementation of a Quality Assurance
System in Organic Retail” in ADAM is the following (fig.3).
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Fig. 3. Snapshot of ADAM project
The project operator in ADAM can give other people the right to edit this
project. If this person is already known in ADAM, the operator can simply enter his
e-mail address, while If this person is not known, he can enter his data in the form
and submit. The person will receive an e-mail with a password and a link to this
project.
Before a project is made visible in ADAM, it has to be checked and
authorized by the National Agency. In our case, after Project’s submitting and
validation, the project was available in public on ADAM portal (http://www.adam-
europe.eu/) on March 15.
Our ADAM project page will be continuously updated with upcoming
events, new products and files available to the public.
Dropbox
The Dropbox Desktop Application is software that watches a folder on the
desktop computer and syncs any changes to the web and other computers. Dropbox
makes obsolete transferring data between computers. In this view, Dropbox is a
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basic element in the co-operation of staffs between two or more countries, as in our
case.
For our project’s requirements there was created a file named “ECO-
QUALIFY III GR-GB-RO-TK” in dropbox.For the projects necessities, every
partner has signed in Dropbox and has the opportunity to add/share files with each
other. This is an extremely easy and immediate way of sharing documents.
The contents of our ECOQUALIFY III project file are as in the following
figure:
Fig. 4. Snapshot of Dropbox files
In the “administrative project” file, there are Guidelines for partners and files
with special conditions for the management of the project, while in the “all
meetings” file there are documents about the past meetings as well as all the relative
material of the project, produced during these meetings.
The “Concept EQ III” file contains important parts of the project such as: the
final form of the Application, the budget tables and the tasks per partner and other
templates relative to the project management.
There is also a file named “info on ECOQUALIFY I + II” that contains
information about the previous projects on EQO-QUALIFY.
Of great importance are the files “Project EcoQualify outputs” and “Project
docs works”, where partners place the results of their work. According to these,
partners of the project can add files in Dropbox at anytime and via this tool there is
the opportunity for easy and fast management of the Project.
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3 Discussion and Results
The application of innovative informatics tools for the implementation of the
Eco-Qualify III project comes to meet the requirements of a “transfer of innovation
project”. Based on the previous described specialized informatics tools, the
dissemination and valorization of the project are easier and people interested in the
field of Organic agriculture (consumers, producers and retailers) are able to get
familiar with it and the principles of the Quality Assurance System. Up till now, the
implementation of previous Eco-Qualify projects, as well as the current one, by
using the informatics tools already mentioned, has provided considerable assistance
on showing off the peculiarities of each country and implemented economies of
scale on creating a credible quality assurance scheme.
The concrete advantages for the countries (Greece, Romania, Bulgaria and
Turkey) involved in Eco-Qualify III are going to be obvious in the upcoming years,
considering that Organic Agriculture is generally expanding and a well established
European system for Quality Assurance is of great importance for organic food
retailing.
Many other countries - inside and outside the European Union- can benefit
from this Project, thus trying to adapt the Quality Assurance System to their national
needs. Probably, this could be achieved under certain prerequisites for each country
and the dissemination of the Project via the application of informatics technologies
moves towards this direction.
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References
Badgley, C., Moghtader, J., Quintero, E., Zakem., E. Chappell., M., Avilez-
Vazques, K., Samulon, A and Perfecto I. (2007) Organic Agriculture and the global
food supply. Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, 22, p. 86-108.
Giannakas K. (2002) Information asymmetries and consumption decisions in
Organic Food Production Markets. Canadian Journal of Agricultural Economics, 50,
p. 35-50.
Lohr L. (1998) Implications of Organic Certification for market structure and trade.
American journal of Agricultural Economics, 80, p. 1125-1129.
Morgan, K and Murdoch J. (2000) Organic vs Conventional agriculture: knowledge,
power and innovation in the food chain, Geoforum, 31, p. 159-173.
Raynolds L. (2000) Re-embedding global agriculture: The international organic and
fair trade movements. Agriculture and Human Values, 17, p. 297–309.
Rigby, D and Brown, S. (2003) Organic Food and Global Trade: Is the market
delivering Agricultural Sustainability? Discussion Paper, ESEE Frontiers II
Conference.
Scialabba N. (2000) Factors influencing organic agriculture policies with a focus on
developing countries. IFOAM 2000 Scientific Conference, Basel, Switzerland, 28-
31 August 2000.
http://www.adam-europe.eu/adam/homepageView.htm
http://www.dropbox.com
http://ecoqualify.at.o-r-a.org/
http://ecoqualifyiii.uth.cs.teilar.gr/home/ http://www.epa.gov/agriculture/torg.html
http://www.equalita.de/cmsen/
http://www.fao.org/organicag/en/
http://www.minagric.gr/greek/agro_pol/frontpage.htm
http://www.organic-europe.net/country_reports/greece/default.asp
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