Talk given to a stakeholder meeting organised by SemaGrow and agINFRA, focusing on how the agricultural data community and the data infrastructures come closer - giving the business potential and perspective (and especially the startups and SMEs).
Can a data infrastructure become relevant to small businesses?
1. Can a data infrastructure
become relevant to small
businesses?
Nikos Manouselis
Agro-Know Technologies
nikosm@agroknow.gr
2. We help organizations and
people to address societal and
environmental challenges
using solutions that are
informed and enhanced by
high-quality data
We develop and put in real
practice end-to-end, modular
solutions that transform data
into meaningful knowledge
and services
3. Our values
use open data to solve
meaningful societal challenges
create a data-powered
ecosystem that may bootstrap
agricultural & food innovation
embrace all data sources,
formats & types relevant to
agricultural research &
innovation
promote open source and
open data
4. Our vision
To add value to the rich
information available in the
wide spectrum of agricultural
and biodiversity sciences
To make it universally
accessible, useful and
meaningful, through
innovative tools, services and
applications
7. some figures
• Food - Gross Production Value globally in
2011: $2,318,966,621 millions
• Agriculture - Gross Production Value globally
in 2011: $2,405,001,443 millions
• Investment in agriculture - Gross Capital
Stock globally: $5,356,830 millions
… they are big
10. One of the most promising routes to agriculture modernisation
seems to be the provision of Open Data to all interested parties
• In an era of Big Data, one of the most promising routes
to bootstrap innovation is by the use of Open Data:
– e.g. provisioning, maintaining, enriching with
relevant metadata, making openly available a vast
amount of
• The use and wide dissemination of these data sets is
strongly advocated by a number of global and national
agricultural policy makers such as:
– New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition G-8
– Food & Agriculture Organization of the UN
– DEFRA & DFID in UK
– USDA & USAID in the US
11. open data for businesses
“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”
12. 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 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)
13. an ecosystem that could look like this
Tech/IT
Tech/IT
industry &
industry &
start ups
start ups
Data science
Data science
community
community
Agricultural
data
scientists
Agricultural
data
aggregators
Agricultural software
app/tool/service
companies
Agro/food industry
Agro/food industry
Agro data providers
Agro data providers
(FAO, CAAS, DEFRA,
(FAO, CAAS, DEFRA,
DFID, etc)
DFID, etc)
Agro/food research &
Agro/food research &
academia
academia
13
15. typical infrastructure assumptions
A legion of software apps/tools/services that
researchers use called Integrated Services
(or whatever)
Grid & cloud
infrastructure
some magic
software called
Scientific
Gateway
(or whatever)
Data Repositories
All the researchers of the world waiting eagerly to use our
enchanted software apps/tools/services
16. typical infrastructure assumptions
A legion of software apps/tools/services that
researchers use called Integrated Services
(or whatever)
Grid & cloud
infrastructure
some magic
software called
Scientific
Gateway
(or whatever)
Data Repositories
All the researchers of the world waiting eagerly to use our
enchanted software apps/tools/services
17. from a business perspective
A legion of software apps/tools/services that
researchers use called Integrated Services
(or whatever)
Grid & cloud
infrastructure
An API backbone
exposing data processing
& management software
Data Repositories
All the researchers of the world waiting eagerly to use our
enchanted software apps/tools/services
18. what we still know nothing of
A legion of software apps/tools/services that
researchers use called Integrated Services
(or whatever)
Grid & cloud
infrastructure
An API backbone
exposing data processing
& management software
Data Repositories
All the researchers of the world waiting eagerly to use our
enchanted software apps/tools/services
19. “Integrated Services”: who builds them?
A legion of software apps/tools/services that
researchers use called Integrated Services
(or whatever)
20. maybe they can reach out to the researchers
Agricultural
data
scientists
Agricultural
data
aggregators
Agricultural
software
app/tool/service
companies
All the researchers of the world waiting eagerly to use our
enchanted software apps/tools/services
21. is there a market beyond
research & education?
30. data aggregation & sharing hub
Cultivation
Harvesting
Ingestion
Enrichment
Translation
Blossom
Publication
Educational
Bibliographic
Data Discovery Services
Unorganized Content in
local and remote sites
Agro-Know Data Platform
Widgets
Educational
Bibliographic
Other
Aggregate
data from
diverse
sources
Works with
different type
of data
Prepare data
for
meaningful
services
Authoring services
Organized and structured
Content in local and remote
DBs
Analytics services
31. in a data-powered value chain like this...
… we have a gap here
Tech/IT
Tech/IT
industry &
industry &
start ups
start ups
Data science
Data science
community
community
Agricultural
data
scientists
…we are here
Agricultural
data
aggregators
Agricultural software
app/tool/service
companies
Agro/food industry
Agro/food industry
Agro data providers
Agro data providers
(FAO, CAAS, DEFRA,
(FAO, CAAS, DEFRA,
DFID, etc)
DFID, etc)
Agro/food research &
Agro/food research &
academia
academia
31
34. its a long way to go
Introductory
Introductory
Courses
Courses
Open Agro Data
Open Agro Data
Hackathons
Hackathons
Acceleration
Acceleration
Boot camps
Boot camps
Ag & Food
Business
Meet Ups
Demo &
Demo &
Investor Days
Investor Days
34
From data cultivation to data blossom, the Agricultural Data platform is an end-to-end modular solution that can transform data into meaningful services. The agricultural data are harvested from diverse sources and after they enrichment are published through a set of web services to external systems. The enrichment of data includes:
improvement of data descriptions
annotation of data with ontologies
translation of data descriptions
The enrichment of the data allows the development of high quality services for specific agricultural communities.
Publishing is responsible for the exposure of agricultural data in a form that can be used a) for the development of data discovery services b) authoring services and c) analytics dashboards to track and study how the agricultural data are used.