The Pharm2Phork Project is a UK registered non profit organisation established (2001) to develop and distribute Open Source Software solutions for the agricultural production, transportation, storage and processing sectors.

While our initial projects primarily addressed compliance with food tracability (EU 178/2002 and Sunrise 2005) regulations the scope has now widened to include Logistics, Warehousing, Asset Tracking and Production and Supply Chain monitoring.

The latest versions have seen a move to new technologies for data storage and analysis (RDF/OWL/Fact++), RIA (Flex4/HTML 5), real time monitors and dashboards, integrated map and proximity support and a Wave(XMPP) server for embedding group collaboration gadgets in HTML pages. The core services and mobile clients have also been refactored for use on a number of new computing platforms including the iPhone, Google Android handsets and soon, with luck, the new iPad.

The latest version of the Middleware replaces the relational database with an RDF data store. Neo4j (default) and Allegrograph have been tested and are fully supported within the base configuration. An interesting technical presentation on graph datastores can be viewed here.

A conversion process is available using d2rq to convert your relational data to the RDF store, or you can use the RDF/RDB bridge, also using d2rq .This is available for Oracle, MySql, SQL Server and Postgres while most XML databases and Oracle RDF are supported through an XSLT based package. A SPARQL endpoint using the bridge with NK-CRM demo data is here.

The suppplied Owl2 ontologies were designed for standalone use or as domain specific imports to the Business Process Management Ontology (BPMO) . Support for importation of industry or organisation-specific ontologies has also been provided through configuration settings.

There is an integrated Fact++ reasoner and additional reasoners such as Racer Pro have been tested and may be easily configured in addtion to or as a replacement for the default.

A pre-configured SPARQL endpoint providing query capabilities and configured for use via HTTP/HTTPS has also been added along with a simple web based query interface. Demo here.

Other new features include Dublin Core, Friend of a Friend and Good Relations meta data exposed via RDFa and the integration of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. Peer group only communications for all media types are still supported through the standard JXTA P2P and JINI (Apache River) services.

The Web Services are in the process of being consolidated on the Amazon EC2 system and AMI's for all components will be made available to support rapid deployment and configuration on the EC2 platform. Demos of the web services are in the process of being made available on our Portal.

The Forum, Portal and News Groups have all been refactored and a new Semantic Media Wiki instance has been added. The Wiki will be populated over time and includes Evri and Open Calis functionality.

Our code repository is moving from the Sun CSV/SVN server to a private repository at GitHub. The repositories have been set up and we are now working on tidying up the code, updating license information to LGPL 3 and replacing some of the in-house code (ALE, EPCIS, TDT) with NetKernel versions of the Fosstrak libraries. SSL keys were sent to all current developers on 18 July and the loading of the repositories was completed on 28 July 2010.

As of January we have also been testing solar powered WIFI routers inspired by the MIT Rooftop project and based on the Green WIFI Project. An interesting paper on developing for resource restricted environments can be found here ICT Project and Sustainability Primer .

The AgEd project has developed courseware aimed at providing secondary level students with an apolitical view of the technologies underlying GMO crop development . We have assembled a few kits which include hardware, software and disposables to do basic experiments in Molecular and Synthetic biology.

The courses are based on the Bio-Rad "DNA In A Bottle" , "GMO Investigator" kits and the latest "BioBricks" assembly kit. More info on these kits can be found on the Bio-Rad and BioBricks Foundation websites. Nature magazine also has a lighthearted resource here.