The IPPC Participation in the 9th InforMEA Initiative Steering Committee held in Montreux Switzerland

The 9th InforMEA Initiative Steering Committee meeting was held from 5-8 June 2018 in Montreux, Switzerland. Ms Paola Sentinelli, Information Management Officer of the IPPC Secretariat, attended the meeting on the IPPC behalf.

The InforMEA Initiative brings together Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEA) to develop harmonized and interoperable information systems for the benefit of Parties and the environment community at large. The Initiative is facilitated by the UN Environment and financially supported by the European Union. The MEA Steering Committee meets annually and provides strategic direction.

This June meeting analyzed the progress report on InforMEA Phase II and inter-sessional work on technical implementation of projects executed since the previous meeting. All participants were invited to take part in working groups moderated by the MEA Secretariat representatives to discuss different areas of work within the InforMEA project. The working groups discussions focused on: Semantic Interoperability and the Potential for Partnership, Evolution of InforMEA E-learning Tool, Technical Interoperability, the MEA Strategic Planning and Internationally Agreed Goals.

The participants formulated and agreed on various recommendations for different initiatives of the project, including: 1) common approach of outreach actions on E-learning; 2) application of the Law and Environment Ontology (LEO) vocabulary in emerging InforMEA content initiatives and revalidation of mappings between MEA vocabularies to LEO; and 3) maintenance of the InforMEA portal to improve quality, reliability and performance by contributing MEAs to clean any issues or incompatibilities with the standards and to improve monitoring tools.

You can learn here more about the InforMEA initiative, and you are invited to take the E-learning course Introductory course to the International Plant Protection Convention hosted in the InforMEA platform.