GODAN, a source of knowledge about open data in agriculture
Fecha del documento: 16-08-2018
The Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition Initiative, known by the acronym GODAN, aims to support "the proactive sharing of open data to make information about agriculture and nutrition available, accessible and usable." To this end, GODAN fosters dialogue and cooperation in agricultural activities between more than 760 members, including governments, private companies, international organizations or NGOs.
Through different working groups, GODAN contributes to share ideas and experiences to solve key problems and challenges in the agriculture and nutrition sectors, using open data. Some of these challenges are ridding the world of famine, ensuring food security, improving nutrition or facilitating sustainable agriculture.
In order to help more companies, organizations and citizens to be aware of the importance of open data to solve these challenges, GODAN promotes the creation and dissemination of resources that drive both providers and users reflection on agricultural open data. Among these documents, we can find:
- Reports, which analyze different challenges and include recommendations or good practices aimed at enriching the available information about agriculture and nutrition, encouraging their analysis and reuse.
- Success stories, which can be used as an example for those organizations interested in being part of this ecosystem, but do not know how to take advantage of open data to generate new initiatives that add value to the sector and solve the aforementioned challenges.
- Courses aimed at strengthening data producers and consumers capacity to manage and use open data in agriculture and nutrition sector.
We have compiled some of these resources, described in the following table:
| Document type | Title | Content |
|---|---|---|
| Reports |
Ownership of Open Data: Governance Options for Agriculture and Nutrition |
Moving to a model where data is open as a standard requires a change in legal, social and technological context, and this will have an impact on data ownership. To achieve this goal, the report analyzes the underlying rights and possible governance systems, such as the inter-organizational statute of open data, laws and policies, social certification schemes, etc. |
| A Global Data Ecosystem for Agriculture and Food | This study tackles open data sourcing and handling cycle, from the point of view of both users and providers, analyzing the challenges to be solved and the roadmap to build an ecosystem for global agricultural data. Among the proposals included in the report, we can find the provision of incentives and the promotion of trust between providers and users. To achieve this goal, a cultural and technological change will be necessary, as well as improvements in data quality, origin and access. | |
| Responsible Data in Agriculture |
The report explores how inequalities between large agricultural corporations and small local producers could be reduced, to guarantee fair access to information. With this objective, they spoke to 14 individuals with different perspectives to understand their main challenges. The report concludes with a series of good practices, which include education and awareness actions, policies reviews or the prioritization of contextual considerations. |
|
| Success Stories | GODAN Success Stories - Issue 1 |
This report, published in 2016, explains different examples of open data projects and initiatives linked to agriculture and nutrition field. Through different stories, we can learn how to extract value from satellite images or how to improve land registration transparency, among other issues. |
| GODAN Success Stories - Issue 2 | The second part of the report was published one year later, with new success stories. In this case, we can find examples as FOODIE, a European initiative that seeks to solve agriculture challenges thank to geospatial data, or BOER & BUNDER, a web application that uses algorithms to extract data value, using simple visualizations to show the results. | |
| Curses | Open Data Management in Agriculture and Nutrition | Free online course with different calls throughout the year. Its objective is to promote agricultural and nutritional knowledge networks in different institutions, raise awareness of different types of data formats, explain possible use cases and highlight important it is for data to be reliable, accessible and transparent. |
To learn more about GODAN resources, you can visit their website publications section. In this section, which is periodically updated with new publications, users will find more documents and reports related to open data in agriculture. The dissemination of these contents can help develop high-level policies, and support the private sector for opening more data, which is fundamental to overcome important challenges for humanity.
