Frequently Asked Questions

INTRODUCING CAREC INFORMATION PORTAL

WHAT IS CAREC INFORMATION PORTAL?

The main objective of CAREC Information Portal is to help stakeholders to access, analyze, and visualize public-domain data to support improved awareness, assessment, and decision support. This is expected to make available comprehensive and up-to-date relevant data and information, linking with high-quality datasets (including time series and spatial information) from global, regional, and local sources, provide analytical tools and interfaces for the visualization and interpretation of data and information (e.g. mapping tools to layer data and map hotspots and areas at risk, screening tools, etc.).

WHAT ORGANIZATIONS ARE BEHIND THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAREC Information Portal?

The portal is supported by the Regional Environmental Centre for Central Asia (CAREC), which is an independent, non-political and non-for-profit international organisation with regional mandate to assist the Central Asian governments, regional and international stakeholders in addressing environmental and sustainability challenges across Central Asian region and Afghanistan.

WHAT IS THE GEOGRAPHIC COVERAGE OF CAREC INFORMATION PORTAL?

CAREC Information Portal covers the Central Asian countries: Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan. It also provides regional outlook, as well as country specific information.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF CAREC Information Portal?

The portal provides comprehensively streamlined data and information on climate and related parameters for the Central Asia. Platform acts like one-stop-shop (portal) for the climate data at regional to national scales.

WHAT IS UNIQUE IN CAREC INFORMATION PORTAL

The portal integrates several interactive aspects of knowledge components, which goes beyond regular knowledge products, like documents. The attention is on interactivity, i.e. user interactivity of data, and multilateral exchange. Examples can be interactivity in Forum or E-learning tools. Platform is organized in tailored way for Central Asian needs, and it is free.

WHO CAN BENEFIT FROM THE PLATFORM?

Organizations: ministries, agencies various institutions, government. Serves various community roles, i.e: Citizens, Trainers, Researchers, Farmers, Decision Makers, and other stakeholders.

WHAT KIND OF KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTS ARE AVAILABLE?

CAREC Information Portal Knowledge & Data Products includes climate related specific publications (journal articles, books (including reviews and chapters), thesis, paper, report, newspaper article, educational and training material, presentation, video, audio and infographics, blogs, news, events, spatial and statistical data.

ARE THERE ANY TRAINING/DEMONSTRATIONS ON CAREC INFORMATION PORTAL? ARE THERE ANY GUIDING DOCUMENTS?

Special e-learning module that contains various thematic webinars and courses is integrated in CAREC Information Portal. To explore the module the user needs to enter Resources menu and choose E-learning in the drop-down list.

WHO WILL ADD NATIONAL DATA TO THE PORTAL? HOW THIS PROCESS IS LEGALLY REGULATED?

The portal relies on open data. The portal facilitates registered organizations to login and upload their open data. Furthermore, organizations can set up their website/platform to allow automatically harvest data, and CAREC Information Portal Team can provide guidance if needed. Please contact by email contact@centralasiaclimateportal.org for any propositions.

DATA MANAGEMENT & OWNERSHIP

IS USING CAREC INFORMATION PORTAL FREE?

The portal relies on open access and free online resources, hence, all CAREC Information Portal products are free of charge.

WHAT CAN I DO IF DATA I NEED IS NOT PROVIDED BY PRIMARY SOURCE FOR FREE?

The Portal may find climate related resources, which are not free. In this case, it redirects the users to the original source for communicating directly with the data provider.

WHAT ARE THE RULES TO USE, COPY, AND REPRODUCE DATA FROM CAREC INFORMATION PORTAL?

All efforts are to make CAREC Information Portal as open as possible. The Knowledge Hub gives all users the full permissions to find, download, and visualize (if available) open data/knowledge products. For the data, which is not free, some functionalities like downloading could be disabled).

WILL I BE REMUNERATED FOR WORKING/GIVING DATA FOR CAREC INFORMATION PORTAL?

CAREC Information Portal is a regional initiative aiming at sharing data and establish network across stakeholders. You can provide your data for free (fully or partially). You can ensure that data is presented with its description (metadata). Then users will be redirected to your site. When you are referenced in CAREC Information Portal as a data provider, reviewer, contributor to the forum, subject matter expert or knowledge creator, you are presented as a trustable source for potential projects and funding opportunities. The network established by CAREC Information Portal can lead you to the new remunerated opportunity despite CAREC Information Portal is not a job seekers website.

WHAT ARE THE SOURCES OF DATA AND INFORMATION IN CAREC INFORMATION PORTAL?

The Platform obtains (harvests ) data from open access sources. The following are examples of sources, where CAREC Information Portal is harvesting: FAO GeoNetwork, NASA - MODIS satellite data, The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository of World Bank (OKRWB), Climate Technology Center & Network (CTCN), Natural Resource Governance Institute - Resource Governance Index Source Library. Each data/knowledge product will have metadata with references to its original source.

HOW CAN I CONTRIBUTE TO THE POOL OF RESOURCES?

CAREC Information Portal Knowledge Hub will enable registered users to log in and upload data/knowledge products.

TECHNICAL CAREC INFORMATION PORTAL

WHERE DATA IS STORED? HOW DATA IS GATHERED?

CAREC Information Portal database will be stored on cloud servers. CAREC Information Portal will store the products’ metadata in CAREC Information Portal Database, a local database hosted on CAREC Information Portal cloud servers for high availability and access to data. The availability of metadata/products depends on the open access resources and freely available data over the internet. Some resources may provide comprehensive metadata, while others may provide a title and a direct link to the original source. CAREC Information Portal harvester will store what is available from these APIs. When CAREC Information Portal consortium of institutions is formed, it is expected the institutional network in the region makes knowledge contributions by providing analytical products and deliverables of their projects for wide public

HOW PLATFORM CAN ACCOMMODATE MY NEEDS OF TARGETED USER PREFERENCES?

The Knowledge Hub gives all users to find, download, and visualize (if available) open data/knowledge products. The actions that require user registration are: uploading data/knowledge products, and forum access. Any CAREC Information Portal user can do targeted search over the data/knowledge products available on the platform to filter based on:

topic, as an example: a. Water Management, b. Climate Change, c. Risk Assessment, d. Food Security, e. Sustainable Agroecosystems, f. Land Degradation;
geo-coverage as: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and International;
type, as an example: map layers, datasets, publications, visualization, news and blogs.

WILL CAREC INFORMATION PORTAL WORK OFFLINE OR IN REMOTE AREAS?

In order to fully access to the resources shared through CAREC Information Portal, it requires a “live” internet connection. CAREC Information Portal currently do not provide an offline installation of the Platform fully working in a local personal computer. While it has been observed that some farmer communities may not have access to internet or knowledge on the usage, in order to meet the needs of the users without an internet connection, the platform ensures that material suitable for improving livelihoods is available, printable, and downloadable by champion farmers or intermediary institutions such as extension departments and NGOs

WILL IT SUPPORT ALL 5 LANGUAGES OF CENTRAL ASIAN COUNTRIES?

CAREC Information Portal first availability will be in Russian and English language defaulted to EN. In later stages, CAREC Information Portal will include five Central Asian languages.

IS CAREC INFORMATION PORTAL SUPPORTED BY PORTABLE PERSONAL DEVICES?

CAREC Information Portal design is responsive, and is able to adapt its graphical interface to the device characteristics (screen size and ratio) of the user. CAREC Information Portal Interface will be accessible through all desktop and mobile devices.

HOW PLATFORM RECOVERS FROM SYSTEM (INTERNAL/EXTERNAL) FAILURES, AND ALERTS FOR FAILURES IN THE SYSTEM?

CAREC Information Portal will seamlessly recover from internal system failures. External data sources may face failures in their system. In order CAREC Information Portal user experience will not be affected as much as possible, the Platform stores in own database certain set of data (meta-data) of external data and knowledge products, which could be enough for certain use. The link to the original source may not be reachable, which is wholly under operation of external web site. Still, when the external source will be operable, all links leading to them become reachable again. The metadata harvester will re-generate metadata on a regular basis.

CAREC INFORMATION PORTAL GOVERNANCE

WHAT IS THE TIMEFRAME FOR CAREC INFORMATION PORTAL DEVELOPMENT? WHERE CAN I FIND DOCUMENTS?

The initial phase of CAREC Information Portal development is one-year from April 2019 to March 2020. Further development and maintenance will be required once the platform is launched. CAREC Information Portal team conducted consultations in all five Central Asian countries with government, private, non-profit agencies, national research and extension services, farmers, international and regional organizations.

DID YOU COLLECT FEEDBACK FROM FARMERS?

We have conducted farmer consultations in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. During the meetings, we have presented and explained the features of the platform, conducted surveys and took into account their advice in the development of the Platform. The reports of the farmer consultations you can read in Russian and English.

WHICH ORGANIZATIONS ARE CONTACT POINTS IN EACH COUNTRY?

The key organizations for CAREC Information Portal development are those steering CAMP4ASB program. We expect that the number of organizations managing CAREC Information Portal will grow over the time thanks to the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). Within each country, there are reference organizations in accordance with data types and user typologies.

HOW PLATFORM IS MANAGED AT REGIONAL, COUNTRY AND ORGANIZATIONAL LEVEL? WHICH GOVERNMENT AGENCIES ARE INVOLVED? HOW THOSE PROCESSES ARE LEGALLY REGULATED?

CAREC Information Portal will be managed by a Steering Committee, which would be formed once the first pilot is released. It is expected that partners will rotate on different data domain and facilitate the forum area of the platform.

WHAT CAN I DO TO CAREC INFORMATION PORTAL LIVE LONG?

If you are from academics, you may suggest your institution to have an interoperable (open data) website that CAREC Information Portal can harvest. If this is not possible at the moment, you may submit your work to CAREC Information Portal for greater visibility. You can engage in subject matter fora and provide news to share progress on CAREC Information Portal domains. If you are a policy maker, you may visit CAREC Information Portal regularly, ask institutions to share their news and knowledge through CAREC Information Portal, and provide evidence that you took decision based on data and knowledge available. If you are an organization, you may join CAREC Information Portaland together upgrade your ICT infrastructure to contribute to CAREC Information Portal sustainability. You may stimulate your employees to contribute to knowledge sharing via CAREC Information Portal or harvestable website.

HOW CAN I WORK FOR CAREC INFORMATION PORTAL AS A CONSULTANT? IS THERE TERMS OF REFERENCE?

The organizations, which will manage CAREC Information Portal might need consultancy services in the future. ToR will be developed by them once there will be an open vacancy.