19th International CODATA Conference
Category: Poster, Interoperability
SICURA, the Spanish Food Safety Network. A cooperative framework in food safety
Antonio Martínez López (amartinez@iata.csic.es) and Remedios Melero (rmelero@iata.csic.es),
Instituto de Agroquímica y Tecnología de Alimentos. CSIC,
Jesús Torrecilla Soria (jesust.leia@sea.es),
Leia. Centro de Desarrollo Tecnológico, Parque Tecnológico de Alava, Spain
The Spanish Food Safety Network (SICURA) is a project that came into being with
the support of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology. The idea of
the network was to establish a framework which brings together scientific, technical
and industrial groups who work in areas related to food safety. The network
was inspired by the European Networks of Excellence announced in the EU's
Sixth Framework Programme (FP6). The overall objective of SICURA is to create
a cooperative environment within the Spanish scientific community and join
efforts towards food safety. The network also promotes food safety features
and collaboration among the sectors involved in it: research, institutions,
industry and society. SICURA’s aims can be summarised
as follows: Determination of emerging problems in food safety, identification
of working groups and their areas of interest, coordination of those groups
together with institutional and social parties, information transfer, training
of young researchers and exchange of human resources, participation in other
national and international forums related to food safety, and finally the creation
of a ‘Virtual Institute’ through the web to provide information, exchange ideas,
interoperability with other systems and a frame for discussion. SICURA’s structure consists of a managing core formed by the
coordinators of the network groups and a permanent committee of 4 people (the
applicants). The working groups within the network are: food quality, hygiene,
rapid identification of microorganisms, innovation
and development in food safety, predictive microbiology, biological risks, sensors
and measurement systems, emerging technologies, and toxicology and frauds. Every
group is coordinated by a member of the network who changes periodically. The
prospects for years 2004 and 2005 are the agreement of future objectives and
activities of the network among the members, identification of the outlines
and needs of participating groups, promotion of SICURA, meetings of the managing
core, elaboration of a report with the conclusions of coordinators about members’
profiles, and the creation of a portal and web tools for information and dissemination
of SICURA activities together with any added values or resources related to
food safety.
Currently SICURA has recruited around 150 members distributed as follows: 35 % from university departments, 30 from research institutes (CSIC), 21 % from technological centres and 14 % from industry and several governmental health services. SICURA’s website is hosted in our institute (http://www.iata.csic.es/sicura/red/sicura-red.html) and provides an overall view of the network’s objectives, structure, groups and their members; it also distributes to a mailing list not open to the general public (SICURA@listserv.rediris.es). SICURA has already launched a survey (http://www2.iata.csic.es/encue/index.php?sid=6) among its members to harvest information about their activities, background, needs and perspectives. SICURA’s portal will be created on the basis of PostNuke, a PHP based content management system used to create and administer websites (free software released under the GNU/GPL license). At the moment the portal ‘is under construction’ and will cover all the features compiled in the survey.