GFAR is working with FAO in the H2020 project "Big Data Europe: Integrating Big Data, Software & Communities for Addressing Europe's Societal Challenges" (BDE).
In their role as partners responsible for the engageent of stakeholders in societal challenge "Food and agriculture", and encouraged by the Project Officer to engage especially the relevant EC Directorates, FAO and GFAR organized the third societal challenge workshop, held in Brussels on 31/3/2017 in collaboration with AgroKnow as technical partner and the eROSA H2020 project represented by the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA).
We gathered together a selected group of EC representatives (from DG AGRI, DG CONNECT, DG RTD, the eROSA project but also other initiatives) that are working on projects related to open data and big data in general or more specifically to the use of data for food and agriculture, as well as a number of actors working in agricultural research and industry and already collaborating in international open data initiatives in our field ().
The intention was to give the opportunity to EC representatives to share with the community representatives the most recent developments in terms of funding agendas or projects relevant to big and open data in agriculture and food, and also to help projects in Europe to better shape and align their agendas to the policy and strategy objectives of the EC.
The agenda was organized around two main sessions:
1) Data sharing for collaboration, where one of the key discussions was on how data sharing may enable collaboration, covering topics related to the European Science Cloud (EOSC), the FAIR principles, and the EIP AGRI Workshop on Data Sharing.
2) Building a European Data Economy, where the discussions were mainly about the recent EC communication on Building a European Data Economy and how the agriculture and food communities reflect on that. Some key data-powered H2020 large scale pilot initiatives were presented and discussed.
Some of the key points dscussed in the Q&A sessions re very relevant to GFAR:
- how to make farmers invest in technology
- DG-AGRI to explore existing potential data governance models focusing on the benefits for the farmers
- Importance to have access to banking data
- lack of a policy framework,
- lack of contract terms for weak parts
At the workshop all the participants agreed on:
- Working together, European community, the BDE partners as well as those of the other initiatives present at the workshop, to build a powerful data ecosystem.
- Focusing on how to explain the value of open data and sharing.
- Making sure that any technical infrastructure developed in the future, within the European Community, refers to the European Open Science Cloud Initiative (EOSC).
The European Community identified in the initiatives present at the workshop (GODAN, BDE, E-ROSA, AgGate) the community of reference (outside of the EC), to multiply the effects of what is done within the EC.
The full report of the workshop is available here.
Antonella Picarella e Valeria Pesce