Presentation delivered during the Introductory Course: "Introduction to agricultural & food safety datasets and semantic technologies" (http://irss.iit.demokritos.gr/2014/hackathon/introductory_course) of the SemaGrow 2nd Hackathon (http://wiki.agroknow.gr/agroknow/index.php/SemaGrow_Hackathon) 4/7/2014, NCSR Demokritos, Athens, Greece

1. Introduction to
Agriculture & Food Safety Data
Vassilis Protonotarios
Agro-Know
2ndSemaGrowHackathon(inconjunctionwithIRSS14)
supported by:

2. Intro to the intro
This presentation aims to:
• Provide basic information regarding the various sources
of agricultural and food safety data
• ranging from definitions to actual data sources, data types and
attributes
• Highlight issues related to the management and use of
this kind of data and possible solutions and ideas for the
exploitation of such data
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3. why agricultural/food data?
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4. Agricultureisabouttoexperiencea“growthshock”
inordertocovertheexponentiallyincreasingfood
needsoftheglobalpopulation
• All demographic and food demand projections suggest that, by 2050, the
planet will face severe food crises due to our inability to meet agricultural
demand – by 2050:
• 9.3 billion global population, 34% higher than today
• 70% of the world’s population will be urban, compared to 49%
today
• food production (net of food used for biofuels) must increase by
70%
• According to these projections, and in order to achieve the forecasted food
levels by 2050, a total investment of USD 83 billion per annum will be
required
• A large part of this investment will need to be focused on R&D
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Key facts about agricultural trends

5. Oneofthemostpromisingroutestoagriculture
modernisationistheprovisionofOpenDatatoall
interestedparties
• In an era of Big Data, one of the most promising routes to achieve R&D
excellence in agriculture is Open Data, and in particular:
• provisioning,
• maintaining,
• enriching with relevant metadata and
• making openly available a vast amount of open agricultural data
• The use and wide dissemination of these data sets is strongly advocated by
a number of global and national policy makers such as:
• The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition G-8 initiative
• FAO of the UN
• DEFRA & DFID in UK
• USDA & USAID in the US
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Open Data in Agriculture

6. why open data?
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7. open: definition
“Open data is data that can be freely
used, reused and redistributed by
anyone - subject only, at most, to the
requirement to attribute and
sharealike”
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8. Why open data?
• Open data, especially open government
data, is a tremendous resource that is as
yet largely untapped
• individuals and organisations collect broad range of
different types of data to perform their tasks
• Government is particularly significant in
this respect
• quantity and centrality of data it collects
• most is public data by law, could be made open and
made available for others to use
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9. Closed data
Examples
…always bad?
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10. in agriculture: a political
priority “How Open Data can be harnessed to
help meet the challenge of
sustainably feeding nine billion people
by 2050”
29-30/4/2013, Washington D.C., USA
https://sites.google.com/site/g8openda
taconference/home

11. about agricultural data

12. agricultural science

13. biodiversity

14. examples of variety & diversity

15. data sets

16. maps

17. photos

18. databases

19. • publications, theses, reports, other grey literature
• educational material and content, courseware
• primary data, such as measurements & observations
• structured, e.g. datasets as tables
• digitized, e.g. images, videos
• secondary data, such as processed elaborations
• e.g. dendrograms, pie charts, models
• provenance information, incl. authors, their organizations
and projects
• experimental protocols & methods
• social data, tags, ratings, etc.
• …
research(+) content

20. where can I find this data?

27. Where to use this data?

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33. there is more…

34. …and more…

35. …and much much more

37. About food (safety) data

39. Data sources

41. Data sources

45. Using open data & knowledge
sharing in agro-food sector

46. using open data to build an open and
scalable infrastructure for food safety

47. usingopendata to supportdecisionmakingfor
regional growth
browse agricultural
resources and activities by
geographical region to
understand opportunities for
grows at regional level

48. using open educational data to support
training on organic agricultural
localize to specific region
by adapting content and
using state of art
language technologies

49. localizing open educational data to
train the trainers

50. organizingevents to spurinnovation
challenges creativity
excellencehack using open data

51. transferring innovation to the regional
ecosystem
collaboration with stevianet.gr experiment
citytofarm.grplatform for ag-machinery sharing

52. accessing the data

53. How to get this data?
• APIs
• SPARQL endpoints
• OAI-PMH (for metadata)
• HTML / data scraping
• ………

54. so, what’s the catch?

55. open data is not always ready to be
used….
• Messy data
• Should be collected/fused
• Should be filtered
• Should be validated
• Should be enriched with metadata to become
discoverable
• Should be standardized to allow interoperability

56. 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 agro/ food products
(agro apps consumers) need…
• …companies that build apps on agro data (agro data
consumers, agro apps producers) who need…
• companies that process agro data (data science powered)

57. thank you!
vprot@agroknow.gr
http://www.agroknow.gr
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