Nikos Manouselis, CEO of Agroknow, discusses the importance of transparency in food safety information and the development of a global, open data infrastructure for agriculture and food. The initiative involves collaboration with several key partners and aims to make agricultural data more accessible and usable through innovative applications and services. The document also highlights emerging business models utilizing open food data, emphasizing the need for technical skills and collaboration in the agricultural data ecosystem.

1. Scaling up (and doing business
with) food safety information
transparency
Nikos Manouselis, CEO Agroknow
nikosm@agroknow.com

2. intro

3. We find, connect and deliver agriculture and
food information worldwide

4. what we do
• We Lead: the development of a global, open,
shared data infrastructure for agriculture and
food
• We Support: public sector and international
organisations to make their information
discoverable and usable
• We Make: innovative online applications and
services

5. indicative partners & clients
• Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
• Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR)
• International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)
• CABI
• UK’s Dept for International Development (DFID)
• World Bank
• Michigan State University (MSU)
• Wageningen University & Research (WUR)
• French Institute of Agricultural Research (INRA)
• International Centre for Research in Organic Food
Systems (ICROFS)

6. open data advocates & business
• CIARD.net: a global movement dedicated to open
agricultural knowledge
• Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition
(GODAN): make agricultural and nutritionally relevant
data available, accessible, and usable for unrestricted
use worldwide
• Open Data Institute member (UK HQs & Athens node)

7. large scale data-related projects
• agINFRA: a data infrastructure to support agricultural scientific
communities (2011 - 2015)
– 12 partners (incl. FAO, OU); tech coordinator, evaluation, sustainability
– in G8 Open Data in Agriculture Action Plan for Europe
• SemaGrow: Data intensive techniques to boost the real-time
performance of global agricultural data infrastructures (2012 - 2015)
– 8 partners (incl. FAO, WUR); tech, evaluation, sustainability
– in G8 Open Data in Agriculture Action Plan for Europe
• OpenMinTeD: Open Mining INfrastructure for TExt and Data (2015-
2018)
– 15 partners (incl. UoA, EBI, INRA); tech+data, requirements & evaluation
• Big Data Europe: Integrating Big Data, Software and Communities for
Addressing Europe’s Societal Challenges (2015-2018)
– 12 partners (incl. FAO); agri-food community & use cases

8. We lead
• a data management & sharing infrastructure for agriculture & food
a) a global atlas of agricultural research (including institutions,
people, publications, data sets, projects, courses, instruments,
tools)
b) a semantic layer of processing, enriching & interlinking research
information from distributed, heterogeneous sources & formats
c) a catalogue of software components (open source software
stack & APIs) that anyone may use to process research
information
d) a help desk service to support institutions & projects that wish
to publish their research information openly
e) a set of data-rich service and application demonstrators for
specific case studies (food safety, viticulture, …)

9. a global agri-food information atlas

10. registry of data sources/sets

11. published & linked vocabularies

12. open stack of software for big data
analytics & text/data mining

13. complex data processing workflows
Metadata
harvester
Filtering
component
Stores
File system
(DC, IEEE
LOM, MODS
XML)
File system
(DC, IEEE
LOM, MODS
XML)
Stores
Identification and
de-duplication
component
MySQL
Dupli
cates
Stores
Transformation
component
( to AKIF)
Store
metadata in
JSON (Internal
Format)
Link checking
component
PostProcessing/
Enrichment
component
File
system
(XMLs)
Get unique ID
Records
with
Broken
Links
Indexing mechanism
API

14. enabler of communities
– supporting very active global data-related communities
of practice from around the world
a) advocacy & decision making stakeholders (CIARD, GODAN)
b) agricultural data/knowledge managers (FAO’s AIMS, RDA
IGAD, ODI)
c) agri-tech software developers & companies (OADA, FIWARE)

15. scaling up food safety data sharing

16. enable enhanced semantics

17. extract structured data from text

18. link to food recall data

19. produce meaningful visualisations

20. support data customisation & filtering

21. share in multiple formats

22. doing business with open food data
“new businesses and new
business models are beginning
to emerge: Suppliers,
aggregators, developers,
enrichers and enablers”
“key link in the value chain for
open data is the
consumer…direct relevance to
the choices individuals make as
part of their day-to-day lives”

26. from challenges to businesses
Challenges
Contests &
competitions
Ideas for new
apps &
businesses
Proven
solutions &
business
models
calls for ideas on
how to address
through…
inviting the
development
of new…
Using open data &
platform APIs
exposing, piloting &
co-developing
solutions via
testing…
Identification &
mapping of…
showcasing, convincing &
inviting more
communities to …

27. is data plug and play?
• No!
– requires a deep understanding of the data
– requires excellent data processing & analysis skills
– requires very good technical skills
• will evolve into a data-powered value chain
– the companies that develop innovative food
products need…
– …companies that build apps on food data who
need…
– …companies that process agro data

28. a good example

30. Agro/food industry
Food data providers
(FERA, DEFRA, DFID,
RASSF, FAO etc)
Agro/food research &
academia
Food software IT
companies
Food data
scientists
Data science
community
30
Tech/IT
industry &
start ups
Food data
aggregators
an ecosystem that could look like this

31. join the big data wave
www.big-data-europe.eu

32. Thank you!
Nikos Manouselis
nikosm@agroknow.com
www.agroknow.com