Tainan, Taiwan
August 21, 2009
Source: The World Vegetable Center Newsletter
Dr. Chris Ojiewo, Vegetable Breeder (vBSS)
AVRDC – The World Vegetable Center
Regional Center for Africa
Hortivar is a database hosted by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on performances of horticultural cultivars in relation to agroecological conditions, cultivation practices, the occurrence of pests and diseases, and timing of production.
Vegetables are one of the six categories of horticultural crops covered in Hortivar.
It is a platform for horticultural knowledge management and exchange and has been created to improve the accessibility and dissemination of data/information on varietal performance of horticultural crops and enhance their use, especially in tropical and sub-tropical zones.
For AVRDC – The World Vegetable Center, Hortivar is an interesting communication tool. During the Vegetable Breeding and Seed Systems (vBSS) Innovation Platform meeting held at AVRDC Regional Center for Africa in Arusha on 31 July 2009, the Hortivar web site was presented to the 19 participants. “While all showed strong interest in such a platform and appreciated the efforts by FAO and its partners to provide horticulturalists with a useful tool, some expressed their concern about the importance of quality control when new data is fed in,” says Dr. Chris Ojiewo, vBSS Vegetable Breeder and Hortivar Project Coordinator at the Center.
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Hortivar has made provisions for control of data quality by appointing crop and country gatekeepers who validate the data and make timely corrections as needed. Some participants wanted assurance that their data would not be misused. “Hortivar leaves no doubt that it respects the privacy of data,” says Dr. Ojiewo. “Entries not intended to be shared will be invisible. Besides, the individual username and password are
private, and personal data will not be shared.”
Access and use of the database is free of charge. Data are retrieved by searching according to various parameters such as crop, species, cultivar, country, geographical references, pest resistance, ecozone
and production systems. Data registered in the database are site specific.
The Hortivar web site may be of interest to the private sector. Some of the participating private seed enterprises announced they would consider corporate registration.
Dr. Marilyn Belarmino, AVRDC Genetic Resources Support Scientist, promised to link her former university, Visayas State University in the Philippines, to Hortivar for sharing and managing data.
A training of trainers on the use of Hortivar has been scheduled for 17 and 18 September 2009 at AVRDC Regional Center for Africa. Twenty participants from the public and private sectors already have been invited. The response is encouraging and shows there is a demand for this type of horticultural knowledge management.
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