A Portal Technology to support European Organic Animal Production

Summary

Organic Agriculture (OA) is a reply to Global Society‘s interest in food safety and enviromental conservation. Many European countries have significantly developed the OA sector, where Organic Animal Farming (OAF) systems hold a major part. Since, OA principles, methods and products are constantly evolving, an increasing number of agricultural agencies are using Web sites or portals to provide OA information to stakeholders. However, finding trustworthy information on OA is still time consuming, fragmented and associated with linguistic obstacles.
This paper reports a new on-line service that provides (a) access to multilingual, specialized, updated and certified on-line information covering all OA plant and animal production aspects, (b) access to electronic commerce and mobile services to all participants of the OA chain and (c) user-friendly access via various communication channels. The on-line services are implemented via a central portal at the European level, aiming to provide a single point access to vari-ous OA agents. The portal presented is the result of a research programme in the context of the European Union e-content project 11293 “BIO@GRO”. The http://bioagro.aua.gr portal is ambitious to cover all the information needs of the OA stakeholders.