Evaluation and visions

In an attempt to evaluate the efforts of Dina during its 8-9 years of existence it can be immediately concluded that the story of Dina is essentially a success story. The original objectives have been met to a large extent, and the initial vision behind the network has proved valid and durable. This is reflected in several ways. 1. The number of members has expanded: Starting with three member institutions (two of which later merged into one), Dina today includes a total of seven 'nodes'. 2. An international evaluation of the Danish national PIFT research programme, which formed part of the funding basis for Dina in its first years, gave Dina a most favourable mention. 3. After Dina had initially received direct national support, the member institutions from the mid-1990's took on the basic funding responsability. 4. In October 1999 the board of Dina recommended to the members that the network be kept up at least until 2002.
The success of Dina is based firstly on the collaboration - to some extent invisible, but not less real for that reason - established from basic science over applied research to advisory services; secondly on local benefits with respect to scientific development and infrastucture; thirdly on the tangible network that has been formed, a.o. expressing itself in the organisation of general thematic days, workshops and courses; and last, but not least on the research school activities where a new standard for organising PhD courses has been set.
From the start of Dina, the task of PhD training has been in focus. The first generation of Dina related PhD projects were especially important; not only did they lead to good research but they also produced strong specialists who are now holding key positions for the implementation of modern IT in Danish agriculture and land use. The experiences from this first brood of PhD's formed the basis for establishing Dina Reseach School which quickly became one of the most successful activities of Dina - including the Nordic collaboration it has initiated. Danish computer science has no tradition, like there is in for example statistics, for creating courses for PhD students in the biological sciences, such as agriculture. Dina Research School has by now broken new grounds with this type of courses.
When enumerating the local benefits and efforts at the seven member institutions, it is natural to state first that Dina has been no less than decisive for the creation of a strong research group at DJF (Foulum) in the fields of biometrics and informatics. The process profited from fruitful links to research groups in informatics at the universities, primarily at KVL and AAU but also at AU. Much work was done in Decision Support Systems where, at an early stage, the particularly successful project Pl@nteInfo demonstrated the potentials of the Internet for agricultural advising.
At KVL (Copenhagen), computer science research hardly existed before 1991. Dina helped filling in this gap, in close collaboration with DTU. Also at the educational level, KVL has profited substantially from this cooperation. Another educational initiative taken by Dina is the project Biomodels which has received support from the Danish Ministry of Education and has been carried out at KVL 1997-99, with quite some success. With regard to specific research projects, Dina KVL has cooperated with FSL in statistical image processing, with results that reach the international leading edge in forest inventory; the plant-soil-atmosphere model Daisy was thoroughly reprogrammed, thus creating a platform for professional applications; and decision support in animal production was developed.
The research groups in statistics and computer science at AAU (Aalborg University) provided strong expertise in probabilistic decision support systems to agricultural applications. The AAU groups also created the successful system / company Hugin A/S; Dina can hardly take any credit for that but has benefited greatly from Hugin. Several scientists trained at AAU are now working at other Dina nodes; and one of the first Dina PhDs is employed at AAU.
Dina, in particular the creation of Pl@nteInfo, helped in giving DAAC (Skejby) an early start in adjusting smoothly to the rapid development of IT, the Internet and the web. Dina projects formed basis for improvements of models behind DAAC's advisory systems.
From the start of Dina, computer scientists at DTU (Lyngby), in particular A.P. Ravn and J. Steensgaard-Madsen, were instrumental in basing the Dina activities on sound computer science principles. It is fair to say that Dina DTU has up to now yielded more to cooperation in Dina than benefited from it but it is intended to change this situation in the near future.
At FSL (Hørsholm), the main impact of Dina relates to forest inventory using statistical image processing, cf. the above para on KVL. However also the collaboration on Internet advisory systems is promising.
Risø (Roskilde) is a newcomer in Dina, and it is too early to evaluate the effect of the cooperation, but it seems most promising in view if the importance of agricultural applications of bioinformatics and quantitative genetics.
Let us mention some aspects of the general network and collaboration activities which have resulted from Dina.

• The organisation's working practice has been an example of early promotion of electronic infrastructure, video-conferencing and extensive use of the WorldWideWeb.
• Dina has been active at the international level, among other by giving a vital contribution to the creation of the European network organisation EFITA.
• By selecting a number of priority research areas and procuring them with associated IT coordinators, Dina has from 1997 contributed even more to tightening and targeting the over-all Danish effort in IT in agricultural research and development.
• Dina has been a platform for establishing specific research project proposals and for applying for funding for such projects. Some of them were obtained by Dina directly, others were helped along. In later years several major applications were submitted by Dina or in relation to Dina.
• To fill actual needs but also to enhance Dina's function as a meeting point for scientists from different backgrounds, Dina has organised regular thematic days and workshops as well as occasional courses; many people have taken part in these arrangements and it is the general impression that they have been appreciated.

One reason for Dina to claim the status of a pioneer organisation is that 'Informatics in agriculture' does not exist as a recognized scientific discipline- the expression is merely a label, notably used by Dina, to denote a meeting point for collaboration or transfer of knowledge between disciplines. As such it is important, but the quality of research depends heavily on the participants being scientifically active and recognized in their respective disciplines, be they agriculture or informatics. This is the reason why relatively few Dina related papers in the area were published in international journals in the first years. But the situation is improving; besides the Dina seniors in general have a good record of refereed publications. The number of Dina based PhD dissertations should also be noted; see Tables 4 and 7 below.

Dina should continue

Throughout 1991-1999 it has been understood that Dina might be only a temporary phenomenon - that after a certain period, when IT and agriculture had reached a really good level of cooperation with mutual benefit, then it could be time to decide that Dina has had its day and can now close down its activities. When drawing up the balance-sheet, like we do in this report, it is appropriate to ask quite bluntly: Should Dina continue into the 21st Century?
Since there is a general agreement that Dina Research School is a valuable activity, a more realistic phrasing of the question would be: Should Dina close down its activities as a general network and continue only the research school, with a minimal background organisation?
Such a decision would have a number of negative consequences:

• When a network and a forum for organized interactions - such as regular workshops and thematic days - between scientists do not exist anymore, it is less likely that new achievements in informatics and new demands in agriculture which, when combined in cooperation, could have a vast potential, are detected and explored in time.
• Dina Research School, including its newly established Nordic network funded by NorFA, will suffer serious damage. Even if the research school were given a more permanent existence within NOVA University, it will hardly be able to survive without the backing from Dina, including the motivation and the direct scientific support from university informatics environments. It is possible that the new IT Universities in Copenhagen and in Western Denmark will some day develop courses in informatics for biology oriented PhD students but they will hardly place a strong emphasis on agricultural and agro-environmental subjects.
• Locally, at the seven nodes, virious losses can be foreseen.

- At DJF, the lack of strong links to KVL, AAU and other universities will make it harder to recruit scientists to the biometry and informatics research groups in Foulum, and probably also to develop IT applications in Flakkebjerg, Bygholm and Aarslev, even if the impact of Dina these three places has been limited.
- The KVL research group in computer science may have to close down and it can become necessary to ask the IT University of Copenhagen to take over teaching and PhD education in IT related subjects for KVL students. New projects and the production planning / decision support group in animal science at KVL will get less chances to draw on computer science expertise at other universities.
- At AAU, other sectors can provide applications for the statistics and computer science groups and challenge new theoretical developments, but AAU would still benefit from taking agricultural applications and challenges seriously, and with Dina this is more likely to happen.
- Whether Dina exists or not, DAAC must spend much money and manpower on developing IT- and Internet-based advisory systems, and DAAC can buy the expertise they need. But without Dina it becomes less easy to provide a smooth link to IT and informatics environments at the universities.
- The question for DTU will be whether a closing of Dina will reduce chances of developing agricultural applications and of supplying the engineering sciences with agricutural and environmental challenges.
- Without Dina, FSL will be forced to find new ways to provide expertise and collaboration in IT and modelling, in particular to support PhD projects.
- Since Risø has just joined Dina, stopping Dina would hardly be a disaster. But promising possibilities would be cut off, just before they were to be tried out.

To conclude, there is ample evidence that Dina will still be needed well into the next century. The Dina board came to the same conclusion in October 1999 and decided to recommend to the member institutions that Dina be continued at about the same level as now for at least three more years, that is, to 2002. In the following we outline the conclusions for Dina's future activities.

The future Dina

Dina should continue. And there is no need for any drastic changes in the organisation nor in the financial basis of the Dina Network - which is certainly not the same as to say that nothing new will happen at the professional level.
The general network of Dina works smoothly, and there is no reason to change its basic framework including the system of priority research areas and IT coordinators (though the set of specified areas can of course change, coordinators can stop and new can begin). Neither should Dina leave the practice of arranging workshops and thematic days from time to time. It is the ambition that the yearly general workshop or seminar is established as an attractive meeting point for scientists from the involved disciplines and for everybody else who is seriously interested in the use of informatics in agriculture.
The research school activities are praised from all sides; they should continue essentially as now, with workshops and summer courses, and might even be further developed. One development, which would give a still better basis for Dina Research School, would be at hand if a basic group of PhD students were funded directly by the school and were involved in Dina projects. Ideally the research school activities - workshops and summer schools - should have 50% such Dina PhD students and 50% other PhD students as participants.
Apart from contributing to the Biomodels project, Dina has up to now been only slightly engaged in education at a pre-PhD level. Dina might in the future consider the possibility of involving more master and bachelor students in its activities. Among the possible areas for joint educational action, the following could be mentioned: Decision support systems; Biomodelling (mathematical models); Stochastic modelling in agriculture; Bioinformatics in agriculture; Engineering- and IT-technology in agriculture; Internet based advisory systems.
Among the local visions at the Dina nodes, let us mention a few. - At Dina DJF the development phase of the successful outward-looking activity Pl@nteInfo can now be considered completed, and it is time to focus more on identifying scientific project results and data sets that can be elucidated by using Pl@nteInfo. Also Dina's interaction with DJF departments other than those at Research Center Foulum are to be developed, to make scientific collaboration more frequent. - At Dina KVL there are several areas of possible new collaboration that could be looked into. - While students at KVL are generally well aware of the importance of statistics, the visibility of informatics and mathematical modelling in the curriculae should be enhanced. - It is intended to involve the highly competent experts in Dina Aalborg even better and more directly in research interaction with agricultural experts. The same goes for computer scientists at KVL and mathematical modellers at DTU; these experts are already of crucial value to Dina Research School.
It is the hope that Dina shall also in the future, through the network, be able to to create new and challenging research projects involving Dina partners and others. However it is to be expected that Dina as such will only in exceptional cases act as 'the' applicand for project funding. Furthermore, there are no plans of expanding the role of the Dina website which will be used mostly as a means of communication within Dina itself. It is intended to reduce the administrative costs of running Dina as much as possible, without compromising the principle that all activities be visible in the budget.
Finally, Dina should continue its contact and exchange of ideas with organisations like DSIJ and EFITA and should generally strengthen the international dimension, notably in a Nordic and a European context.

Budget implications. The basic principles of Dina, as expressed in the by-laws par. 8 (updated in Jan. 2000), state among other that all common Dina activities must be funded in a visible way; that each member institution commits itself to co-finance Dina; and that the contributions from the 7 member institutions are weighted with respect to each other as follows: AAU: 1, DJF: 4, DTU: 1, FSL: 1, KVL: 6, LR: 1, Risø: 1. Dina continues at least until the end of year 2002 with essentially the same activity and with a total budget of 750.000 DKR, corresponding to a member contribution unit of 50.000 DKR.