A new venture from the field that brings in a bumper harvest of information about rice—that forms the main staple diet in large parts of India—hopes to yield a crop of better results for the farmer.

Launched from Philippines in South East Asia, the ‘rice knowledge bank’ as it is called, is available to all interested in this vital crop, via the Internet site www.knowledgebank.irri.org

“It has been said that getting information from the Internet is like drinking from a fireman’s water hose; meaning that there is so much content, it’s hard to find exactly what you are looking for,” Dr Albert Dean Atkinson, the scientist at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), told this correspondent.

So, the rice knowledge bank aims to “narrow the flow” of information by specifically targeting rice research, information, and training conducted at IRRI. In other words, it’s not a repository of everything related to rice from around the world.

For example, a simple Web search reveals over 6.2 million hits on rice. To counter this information overload, materials in the rice research bank are designed to be available in summarised, useful, and educationally appropriate forms and are focused specifically around the work done at IRRI, says Atkinson.

“It is superior to existing paper or Web-based resources as it is the first of its kind to utilise a concept known as single-source publishing. This concept allows the RKB’s content to be available on the Web, on CD-ROM, or in print from the same source.

Thus, information is updated or expanded from a single source and then made available to all in the format that best suits their circumstances,” says Atkinson.

The Rice Knowledge Bank is targeted at the same audience as IRRI (the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute)—essentially the National Agricultural Research and Extension Services (NARES) in the countries IRRI works in.

Larger audience
“But we are finding that a much broader audience is accessing the Knowledge Bank website than we had anticipated. These include university professors, students, and even some who are coming to our site to see ‘how we did it’ so they can get their own knowledge repository built,” says Atkinson.

This venture was set up for a ‘delivery cost’ of less than $5000 for software deployed in development and related costs.

“The only additional costs we will have would be the costs associated with hosting the content on the Internet. We run the knowledge bank on a server at IRRI and use IRRI’s connection to the Internet,” says Atkinson.

This site claims to have received over one million hits since it was launched in April 2002.

“IRRI’s focus is to grow more food on less land using fewer chemical inputs and less water, while protecting the environment. The trend is toward integrated nutrient, pest, and water management. Therefore, the emphasis of the RKB is the same as IRRI and will focus more on traditional and low- input farming technologies rather than chemical-based operations,” says Atkinson.

“Our partner institutes, such as Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU) in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu do great work in creating and disseminating rice-based information,” he adds.

Atkinson argues that India’s growing telecommunications infrastructure could result in more opportunities to use the Internet to deliver training, and this is where the rice-knowledge bank can assist.