1. agINFRA is an open data infrastructure for research in agriculture that aggregates existing data systems and takes advantage of advanced services and infrastructure. 2. It is designed to foster sharing of diverse research data such as primary data, secondary data, provenance information, and reports by making the data open, interlinked, and meaningful through explicit semantics. 3. The infrastructure provides researcher-centric services in a sustainable way by adapting existing widely used components to be scalable and maximize interoperability.

1. agINFRA
– open data
infrastructures for
research in agriculture
Antun Balaz
Institute of Physics Belgrade

2. agINFRA in a few sentences
① Based on a linked open data architecture
harmonizing semantics and ontologies.
② Aggregating data of existing systems and taking
advantage of advanced Grid services and
infrastructure.
③ Devised for scalability and maximum interoperability
by adapting existing widely used components.
④ Fostering diverse communities of heterogeneous
providers and users.
⑤ Providing researcher-centric services.

3. Why agINFRA?

4. Why sharing data?
• Sharing research data is an intricate and difficult problem
• Not much data sharing may be taking place – with exceptions
in some domains.
• Sharing takes different forms, from private data exchange to
posting on-line, and including journal supplementary
materials.
• There are few standards for giving shared data the required
computational semantics to build automated tools.
• …however reusing data is at the core of the principles of the
scientific method
• … and a major concern for scientists and policy makers.

5. What kinds of data?
• Primary data:
– Structured data, e.g. datasets as tables
– Digitized data: images, videos, etc.
• Secondary data
– Elaborations of the primary, e.g. a dendogram
• Provenance information, including authors, their organizations and
projects
• Methods and procedures followed
• Reports, including papers
• Secondary documents, e.g. training resources
• Metadata about the above
• Social data, tags, ratings, etc.

6. Why a data infrastructure?
• Enables relating data and combining and
contrasting them in novel ways
• Enables scalable processing of research data
• Provides easy-to-adopt and deploy services
• Supports a data-centric, integrated view of research
• Gives a coherent support to a variety of research
objects

7. Conceptual architecture

8. A proposal for an agINFRA
manifesto

9. agINFRA values
We truly believe that scientific data
A | Open | Must be open and interlinked
NOT subject to barriers, based on standard formats and avoiding building
data silos due to lack of interrelatedness and ad-hoc APIs.
B | Meaningful | Must be meaningful through explicit semantics
Reusing the semantics already provided in mature terminologies and
ontologies that are exposed and interlinked through the Web.
C | Reliable | Must be reliable, traceable and accessible
Any kind of research objects can be stored in the data infrastructure, and
there are NO barriers to expressing relations between these objects to
capture the context of research activities.
D | Actionable | Must be actionable trough services that empower research
Data is not useful without flexible and adaptable services that allow
researchers to act on the data in the ways they need.

10. agINFRA principles
We trust that the following principles support the values
Infrastructure People Services
Know and adapt to the Use existing components
Be sustainable in the needs of researchers supported by strong
long term communities
Provide out-of-the-box,
Allow for heterogeneous easy to adopt components Create open services that
and rich kinds of data can be easily composed
featuring semantics Foster collaboration and
sharing of data, via search Adapt services to research
Expose everything as but also casual discovery workflows
linked open data

11. For more information, visit us at:
http://www.aginfra.eu/