The two days conference on open agricultural data, which was initiated by the G8 governments and hosted by USDA and the worldbank was this afternoon successfully concluded. The concluding press release is at  https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4aXVC8hUc3oeEd2NE56LUpzcDA/edit and the  national action plans are documented at  https://sites.google.com/site/g8opendataconference/action-plans

President Obama greeting the participants at the G8 open agricultural data conference.

The conference was enormously rich.  Rich in the presentation of different open data initiatives, which reached from the collection of African house hold data  to the management of the 32 Gigabyte of data from the sequencing of Maize genoms,  rich also in the commitments made.

Secretary Vilsack from the US government defined open data as data that are freely available without restrictions and in formats that are readable not only by humans, but also by machines.  There was a general agreement that data need to be open not only by an open licensing but also in a way that they can easily be accessed by machine agents.

The USA will issue in August data policies for all data produced with federal funding.  Other G8 countries will follow swift.    It is up to the Agricultural Information Management Community to drive forward institutional readiness and technical capacity development.

Johannes Keizer from the AIMS community presented during the conference openAgris and the agINFRA project.