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Currently, the world of business is more and more dominated by companies which possess and know how to exploit their intangible resources, in particular the potential of their employees, to achieve competitiveness. The importance of learning organisations, knowledge organisations and corporate culture has been constantly growing. The article presents the outcomes of a survey carried out with the aim of identifying attitudes of managers of agribusiness organisations to talented people and the role of these people in gaining a competitive advantage. The survey has found that Czech agricultural enterprises are somewhat special in this area and that the existing conditions affect managers' approaches and distinguish them from other large companies in other industries. It has also shown that agricultural companies do not have the same opportunities as large companies to select and develop talented individuals, and therefore these activities should be carried out, to a large extent, by universities.

The paper deals with the very actual sphere of using new tool within the frame of entire supply chain from manufacturer towards consumer. The common idea is a management of the flow of goods by the method which should be enable more effective identification, control, tracking and many follow-ups processes in the distribution channel. Even in retail store, the final consumer could use this instrument for his/her increased satisfactory and comfort during his/her shopping. Presumption for realisation of this goal becomes the implementation of a new phenomenon RFID (radio frequency identification) into current operations performed throughout the all levels of value chain with using modern information technology.

The article stresses the importance of information in the contemporary globalised world. Quantitative technological changes, which influence substantially the world economy, have always been very significant in the history. There are characterized the changes of the production factors as labour, capital, land, information on the world level. Information and knowledge are the most important parts of capital at the present time, since they are the main source of wealth. Information is by its substance very specific as an absolutely non-tangible commodity, which acquires a tangible form only through its bearers (media containing information), eventually it materializes in the performance of people who dispose of the information (in their knowledge).

The paper is focusing on the analysis of some aspects of changes in the economic performance of the farm sector in Slovakia during the first period after the accession to the European Union, as measured by the Economic Account of Agriculture. Authors find that the growth of agricultural goods output was the main element of the improved income generation within the sector during the first year of the EU membership. This was induced by the growth of physical crop output and new subsidies to products. Price alignment played only a minor role in the income growth within the sector. Price increases were limited to some few livestock products. The scope and range of the horizontal price transmissions might have also been influenced by the constraints on the domestic market demand, insufficient functioning of the market support institutions and shortages of marketing infrastructure.

The Delta Group with its daughter company Delta Pekárny, a.s., belongs to the most significant firms in the Czech food processing industry and it is number one baking company in the Czech market of fresh, long-shelf-life and frozen bakery products. The Delta Group associates eleven industrial bakeries in the Czech Republic and four in Slovakia, in addition to mills, Delta Frozen Products frozen-pastry plant, Delibake and Harry's Delta sweet long-shelf-life bakery products' plant, Vegilife company producing healthy food, Eureca Shops running Paneria, Fr. Odkolek fast-food outlets and Le Patio restaurants. In order to consolidate its status of a strong and successful Central-European company capable to meet all requirements of its customers, the company must perform a continuous analysis of external and internal environment.

This article deals with modern approaches to the web applications analysis and design. Many methodologies specialized on web applications analysis and design have been developed, but have not reached mass usability yet, because differences between conventional and web applications are decreasing and requirements for the methodologies of the web applications analysis and design have been changed radically. The main goal of this article is to classify web applications and describe specific analysis and design requirements for each of these classes.

The development of business information systems has the communication gap that exists between business and software experts, because they live in their own well-defined and complex cultures. One place where this gap manifests itself is in the constant failure of software developers to fully capture the system requirements. Second example is the inability to exactly analyze and store business knowledge. In our experience, gathered during the last ten years, working on major software projects, not all system requirements are known at the start of the project and the customers expect that their discovery and refinement will form part of the project. Our solution of this dilemma is in the new methodology called BORM (Business and Object Relationship Modeling), which reuses the object-oriented approach known from the area of software engineering into the area of business process modeling. CraftCASE is the original Czech software tool supporting BORM. CraftCASE is developed to capture and analyze knowledge of process-based business systems. The integral part of the analysis using CraftCASE is object-oriented process diagram and process simulator.

At the present time, the international standards and technical reports for system and software product quality are dispersed in several series of normative documents (ISO/IEC 9126, ISO/IEC 14598, ISO/IEC 12119 etc.). These documents are not purely consistent and do not contain a tools for exact requirements set-ups. As quality is defined as a degree to which the set of inherent characteristic fulfils requirements, the exact requirement formulation is the key point for the quality measurement evaluation. This paper presents the framework for quality requirements for software, which is recommendable to use in the new international standard series ISO/IEC 250xx developed on the SQuaRE (Software Quality Requirements and Evaluation) standardisation research project. The main part of this contribution was presented on the conference Agrarian Perspectives XIV, organised by the Czech University of Agriculture in Prague, September 20 to 21, 2005.

Food safety is important due to new protection measurements applied in the growing world trade as much as the raise and continuity of life quality. In recent years, the countries have begun to face with important problems both in domestic consumption and exportation, because of the sensitivity of consumers on the safety of food products. Regarding this, in the dairy industry, which is an important sub sector of the food industry, the food safety issues has begun to gain importance in developing countries like the developed ones as a result of the world trade. Therefore the aim of this study can be stated as examining the food safety systems for dairy industry and comparing them withTurkey.

Intangible issues, which are often very difficult to be quantified become more and more the field of interest of social sciences. There are many research works demonstrating that various types of knowledge, institutions, social networks, and social relations have a great influence on human activities as for efficient achievement of the actors' goals. This paper relates expert knowledge (shaping professional qualification) to human capital and tacit knowledge (understood as a broader, general, and contextual knowledge) to cultural capital. Both forms of capital exist in their primary form only in concrete individual persons. Concerning collective persons (firm, community), cultural and human capitals are transformed into intellectual capital. Work with specific knowledge, tacit knowledge and capitals corresponding to them shows the role of social networks and social capital in their organization. Using the analysis of two farms based on natural experiment, the paper demonstrates the role of tacit knowledge and cultural capital (opposing to the overestimated role of expert knowledge and human capital). The conclusions outline social determination of both types of knowledge through social networks and social capital needed for an efficient work of a farm.

How does an organization utilize knowledge for the reproduction of its culture in innovations, it was a key-point of the question for an approach based on the methodology of social process in the recent past. Then the formation of knowledge was considered a process of power politics with the consequences for knowledge management. In the framework of those projects, attempts were made in organizations to extract the knowledge from experts and specialized professionals that it might be codified and saved in extensive databases; only then the remainder of employees ought to have possibility to consult them and add the results of their own ideas to these databases. Poor success of such attempts only illustrates the methodological failure of utilizing information technologies for knowledge formation, its storage and transfer. Moreover, when a new fact was soon discovered even in the framework of the new approach, that there was an abyss-like difference between information (that information technologies operate with) and the knowledge, then the significance of personality increased again. The research that was done with the "champions of organizational learning" in the framework of knowledge management emphasized their import in catching the best experience, knowledge codification and its distribution in the organizations. Among other qualities, the knowledge is strongly personalized: it means it is connected with personal experience, attitudes, and evaluations. On the other hand, an advantage of new methodology was that the possible social actions, connected with the knowledge management, search for a strategy, and implementation were studied. These very changes in methodology have been a valuable contribution even for the research into the role of personality within this social process, however. They induce circumstances and means for studying the infrastructure of relationships that make possible the impact of individual authority in organization in general. In this paper, we also pay attention to this social process in teams as compared to collectives and how team-leaders emerge within them.

In the last two decades, the EU trails behind the USA in both the rate of economic growth and the rate of growth of productivity. In addition, in the next 25 years, the EU will experience demographic challenges in the form of the rapidly ageing population and a substantial increase in the dependency ratio. To answer these challenges, the EU needs economic policies which will facilitate the utilization of new technologies. To do that and to alleviate the growing pressures on the European social and economic model, the significant economic reforms are necessary. The key to that is the EU-wide integration of the financial sector.

The utility value presents the main competitive advantage in the knowledge and digital economy. It cannot be achieved without modern technologies, modern organization and operation of the production and social processes. One of the Slovak government's precedences is to establish favourable conditions for the development of knowledge economy in every section. The informatisation level of the agricultural sector is continually increasing. As perspective, we can see the implementation of the knowledge systems in agricultural and food-processing enterprises. The main contribution is mainly the possibility to forecast the development and the state toward the future and the use of knowledge base for ensuring of the operational, tactic as well as strategic management.

The enhanced use of information and communication technologies (ICT) has a strong impact on business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) relationships as well as the way the key business processes are conducted. It can save costs and time, enable businesses to reach a wider market and to respond more quickly to the customer demands. These benefits open up new ways of doing international business. The policy objective is to encourage the integration of e-business into normal business by promoting the take-up of e-business services. Information and communication technologies are necessary to be seen as a tool for the increase of prosperity and competitiveness.

Knowledge and information are the key to successful pursuit of business activity. For the management knowledge, there can be employed among others the expert systems and eLearning. The article provides the expert systems utilization in knowledge management as the expert eLearning component. This solution then makes it possible to preserve the appropriate set of knowledge for a given business activity in knowledge bases and to pass this knowledge in the moment of need in the form of multimedia teaching applications to the appropriate employees.

This article presents some partial conclusions from the solution to the Research Project QF 4142 Higher exploitation of non-food production in the industry. The funding and supporting programmes of the growing of short rotation coppices (SRC) are described. The establishment of short rotation coppices and the subsequent exploitation of wood mass are promising trends of diversification of farmers' activities in the rural space. Plot sizes in ha and financial support to the establishment of the SRC plantations are given for 2001-2004, when a total of 166 ha of supported short rotation coppices was established. The establishment support is paid at a single installment while the amount paid for the establishment of the SRC production plantation is 60 000 CZK/ha and the amount paid for the establishment of mother plantation (reproduction plantation) is 75 000 CZK/ha.

Certain physicochemical and sensory characteristics of the flavoured kefir drink were studied during refrigerated storage. Kefir drink batches were prepared using 2% addition of kefir grains, incubation for 18 h and subsequent filtration. The batches were then flavoured with blackberry, raspberry and strawberry aromas in the concentrations of 0.05, 0.10 and 0.15%, respectively. The samples were taken for analysis on 1^st, 4^th, 7^th, and 10^th days of storage at 4 ± 1°C. The sensory analysis of the flavoured kefir samples revealed the best acceptability level on the 4^th day of storage. Nevertheless, the samples were acceptable all throughout the storage. The percentage of the aroma addition significantly influenced the odour, flavour, texture, and mouth-feel, and the overall acceptability ratings. The higher percentage of the added aroma the more sensed, however, the lowest aroma addition was preferable. The pHs of the flavoured kefir drinks decreased throughout the storage time whereas, the titratable acidity, alcohol content and CO₂ values increased.

A method based on the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) principle was validated for detecting cow's milk in goat and sheep cheeses. DNA was isolated from the cheeses using the isolation kit Invisorb Spin Food I by Invitek Co., designed for the samples of animal origin. The PCR method applied utilizes the sequence of the mitochondrial gene coding cytochrome b which is specific for mammals. It uses the common forward primer and the reverse primer species-specific. After electrophoresis, cow DNA was characterised by the fragment of the size of 274 bp, goat DNA by the fragment of 157 bp, and sheep DNA by the fragment of 331 bp. The detection limit of the PCR method described (1%) was determined with model samples made from pure goat cheese with a defined addition of cheese made from cow's milk. The method validated was applied in the analysis of 17 goat cheeses and 7 sheep cheeses obtained from retail trade. Products of Czech, Slovak, French, Dutch, and Italian origin were examined. The presence of undeclared cow's milk was detected in three kinds of goat cheese and in one of sheep cheese.

The factors important for the acrylamide formation in model systems were studied. The effects of two starch matrices (potato, wheat), the share of two monosaccharides (glucose and fructose) on the formation of acrylamide, and the impact of water addition were compared in model systems under isothermal conditions. Acrylamide was determined by GC/MS-NCI technique. The results showed that the water content is one of the most important factors in the formation of acrylamide, besides the reaction temperature and time. The minimum of acrylamide formation was observed at the water content between 25 and 40%; outside of this range, the acrylamide concentration was higher. The presence of starch reduced the amount of acrylamide formed from asparagine and saccharide, moreover, the effects of potato and wheat starches were similar. Fructose was more effective for the acrylamide formation in comparison with glucose. The combined contribution of glucose and fructose in the mixture with asparagine and starch to the acrylamide level corresponded to the sum of separate contributions of saccharides only at the middle content of added water.

This study was performed to determine the influence of fermented goat and cow milk produced by the use of Bifidobacterium longum Bb-46 on pathogenic Serratia marcescens and Campylobacter jejuni strains. The correlation between the inhibitory effect and some fermentation parameters (the number of viable probiotic cells and pH of fermented milk) was also determined. Bifidobacterium longum counts and pH values were also measured in milk samples during fermentation. The results showed that the inhibitory effect of Bifidobacterium longum Bb-46 fermented goat milk on Serratia marcescens increased with the fermentation time. The highest inhibitory effect of fermented cow milk occurred in the middle course of fermentation. Statistically significant correlation between the inhibition degree of Serratia marcescens growth and pH values of fermented goat milk was noted as opposed to the correlation between the inhibition degree of Serratia marcescens growth and pH values of fermented cow milk which was not statistically significant. All samples of goat and cow fermented milk exhibited inhibitory effects on the growth of Campylobacter jejuni.

The modified PAGE method (TRIS - Glycine buffer pH 8.9) was used for the characterisation of selected 25 registered potato varieties. This method enabled to identify each variety from the examined variety set. The calculation of identity indexes (proportion of common bands) helped to evaluate the similarity of varieties from these aspects. The examination of electrophoretic profiles of soluble tuber proteins, which are highly polymorphic and stable, can be considered as valuable for variety characterization and identification.

This study compares the genetic variation in seven cattle breeds from theterritory ofCentralEurope. Eleven polymorphic microsatellite loci were used to detect differences in the polymorphism of genetic markers in Czech Pied (Simmental), Slovakian Pied (Simmental), Slovakian Pinzgau,Holstein, Polish Red, German Red, and Czech Red breeds. For these loci, allele frequencies, heterozygosity, polymorphism information content, effective population size, and genetic distances were evaluated. The phylogenetic tree was constructed using the unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean and it showed that the Central European Red breeds tended to cluster together, whereas theHolstein was the most divergent from the remaining breeds. These data are discussed in the context of the known origin of respective breeds.

The quality of produced milk and piglet growth were investigated in three groups of lactating Large White sows fed three mixtures containing different levels of lysine, threonine and crude protein. Piglets were weighed immediately after delivery and then in weekly intervals. At the age of 21 days the litter weight was the highest in group B (67.96 kg; P < 0.05), i.e. in the group with the highest dietary content of amino acids. Milk from lactating sows was sampled and analysed. An increased level of dietary amino acids became evident in milk at the first milk sampling (i.e. three days after delivery), when the content of lysine and threonine in milk was significantly the highest in group B (lysine 11.96 g/16 g N; threonine 6.72 g/16 g N; P < 0.05). The level of amino acids in milk and the differences between groups diminished in the following samplings. The changes of crude protein in milk were similar.