Theme 4 – Smart technologies in farming and food systems 13 th European IFSA Symposium, 1-5 July 2018, Chania (Greece) 1 Reflections on co-constructing a digital adviser with stakeholders in agriculture and forestry Julie Ingram, Pete Gaskell Countryside and Community Research Institute (CCRI), University of Gloucestershire, UK jingram@glos.ac.uk Abstract: Many EU and nationally funded research projects into land-based industries, such as agriculture and forestry, provide excellent scientific results. However, outreach and interpretation of these results into ‘ready-to-use’ farming and forestry formats is limited. A key challenge in agriculture and forestry, as in other disciplines, is taking a large body of research-based knowledge and making it meaningful to the user audience. Computer aided search engines and decision support systems potentially can offer cheap access to large repositories with relevant reports and publications, however these cannot substitute the expert-practitioner interaction that complex decision making often requires. This paper examines the process of developing a digital but knowledgeable ‘assistant-expert’. This was developed within an action-research project and aimed to help practitioners and advisers in the field of agriculture and forestry find and share documents that respond to their specific queries. The paper focuses on the methodology which involved the continuous and iterative participation of the stakeholder community, involving project partners (domain experts, advisers) and practitioners. It pays particular attention to the role of the Case Study Partners and case study stakeholders in construction of an ontology on innovations in agriculture and forestry. This structured vocabulary, constructed using concepts provided by domain experts, advisers and practitioners, is a central element of the platform, and is unique, in that it aims to perform as a digital assistant-expert dialogue (helping to articulate queries and provide relevant solutions). The key opportunities and challenges in developing such a novel digital platform within a time-limited research are explored. Keywords: agriculture, forestry, innovation, research outputs, stakeholders, ontology, search tool, semantics,research- translation