G20 International Event on Agriculture and Linked Open Data

On September 27^th and 28^th, the Global Open Data for Agriculture & Nutrition (GODAN) held a series of workshops on agriculture and Linked Open Data in Berlin. This event took place during Germany’s G20 Presidency (Presidency they will hold throughout 2017) as part of the meeting of the G20 itself, with leading scientists in agriculture and information technology.

The agenda for both days had a very similar structure. The day began with a plenary talk, after which the audience was divided into two areas:  one focused more on the technical level (disruptive technologies, new applications and services) and the other focused more on the implementation of policies at the state level. In addition, the presentations of each area were grouped by category.  

Within the category of “Vocabularies, classifications and thesauri”, different tools were discussed (self-labeling, recommendation of labels) for the reuse of AGROVOC concepts, or problems were presented in the creation of a vocabulary regarding the domain of land governance (LandVoc).

There were several presentations on the results of projects with Spanish participation, such as the Agricultural Research Data Repository (REDIA) developed by the National Institute for Agricultural and Food Research and Technology of Spain (INIA). This repository seeks to guarantee the preservation of the data that is generated as part of the INIA’s scientific activity, as well as to satisfy its publication needs, following the requirements of funders and publishers, in order to increase its dissemination and reuse. Another project presented with national participation was FOODIE, where a Cloud-based platform has been developed to host spatial and other agricultural data, expressed through Linked Data.

Within the presentations on “Visualization, navigation and search”, we’d like to highlight VIVO, an open source software and an ontology used to represent academic activity, which allows for information storage, the search for experts, the analysis of work networks or the evaluation of the impact of an investigation, among other things. This work was presented by one of the founders of the tool from Cornell University (United States).

And within all of the presentations, there were a few concepts that were repeated constantly:

• the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) as good practices for the publication of scientific data
• and the importance of metadata when it comes to preserving information and having greater traceability in regards to its origin.

These seem to be some of the issues that the Linked Open Data community is working on and we are sure that we’ll be seeing progress in the near future.