The European Agricultural Research Initiative (EURAGRI) is a European platform for the political and executive organizations in the fields of Food and Agricultural Policy and Research. By providing a forum for informal exchange on opinions and views on developments in science, society and industry, thus facilitating the design, implementation and planning of agri-food research, EURAGRI plays a key role in agricultural research at an EU level. From an organizational point of view, EURAGRI consists of representatives of Ministries of Agriculture and Research in various EU countries, a fact that allows EURAGRI to be in the position to advocate and work at a high level, involving EU countries as members and have an impact on the directions of agri-food research at national and EU level.

On March 9th, 2016, EURAGRI organizes a Workshop titled “Big Data in Agriculture: Consequences for research and research organizations” – an event hosted by INRA, the French National Institute for Agricultural Research. The aim of the workshop is to discuss on how big data can transform (or improve, to be more precise) agriculture through the adoption of big agri-food data (such as through big data analytics) in the agricultural research. Existing efforts are expected to be presented and potential collaborations will be explored in order to facilitate the integration of big data in the agricultural research.

Agroknow is closely following this activity; through the contributions of projects like the Horizon 2020 BigDataEurope of which we are a consortium member, AGINFRA evolves into a big data analytics capable e-infrastructure for agriculture to respond to the need that the European Commission identifies through networks like EURAGRI. Such a big data e-infrastructure would become then a core component of the envisaged European Open Science Cloud and serve a wide variety of stakeholders in the agri-food sector. In this context, AGINFRA is expected to play a key role in this process by facilitating the management and processing of big data in the agri-food research section and its integration in various research applications.

(This post was fisrt published on the Agroknow blog)