FOCUS ON the Big Data Europe Project
Climate, Energy, Food, Health, Transport, Security, and Social Sciences – are the most important societal challenges tackled by the European Union through its new research and innovation Framework Program “Horizon 2020". In any one of these fields, the processing, analysis and integration of large amounts of data plays a growing role – such as the analysis of medical data, the decentralized supply with renewable energies or the optimization of traffic flow in large cities.
Starting in January 2015, the three-year EU project BigDataEurope (BDE), funded by the Horizon 2020 programme, aims to undertake foundational work to manage, publish and use large-scale of data. Food and Agriculture (large-scale distributed data integration) is represented in the consortium by FAO of the United Nations and Agroknow.
Currently, AIMS and BDE are organizing a series of webinars on Big Data in Agriculture open to any interested person (you may find more information below). The next webinar on “Perspectives on Big Data in the CGIAR” by Elizabeth Arnaud (Bioversity International, France) will take place on the 4th of February 2016.
Further information, events and results of the project can be monitored on the BDE website: http://www.big-data-europe.eu/
Highlights from the Community on big data
- Can big data be used for addressing food security? The CGIAR approach. CGIAR forsees funding for a dedicated CGIAR Big Data Analytics Platform. More info
- Mapping big data to existing food & beverage industry problems. The 2013 report on “Formula for growth: Innovation, big data and analytics” outlines the opportunities that big data offers to food and beverage manufacturers. More info
- Using big data for improving food safety. An article on Wired presents a number of cases where big data are used in the food industry. More info
Conferences and Workshops
- The Hague. 6th DBpedia Meeting in The Hague 2016
- Abu Dhabi.GFIA Global Forum for Innovation in Agriculture
- Berlin.Open Science Days 2016
- Online.DCMI/ASIS&T Webinar: Linked Data Fragments: Querying multiple Linked Data sources on the Web
- Tokyo. IGAD/RDA Pre-Conference Meeting
More events at the AIMS Calendar
Upcoming Webinars
- 04th Feb 2016. Webinar@AIMS on Perspective on Big Data in the CGIAR, by Elizabeth Arnaud (Bioversity International) - in cooperation with the BigDataEurope consortium
- TBA. Webinar@AIMS on Big Data targetting Social Challenges, By Simon Scerri (University of Bonn) - in cooperation with the BigDataEurope consortium
Glossary
What does “Big Data” stand for? A collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications. The challenges include capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, transfer, analysis, and visualization. (Wikipedia)
More info: Big Data Definition, Publication on Big Data for Development: From Information- to Knowledge Societies
Read the interview with Bryn Williams-Jones in the AIMS Interviews section.
The scope of the AIMS Newsletter is to bring under the attention of the AIMS community recent news, events and achievements in the field of agricultural information management. If you have any contribution, suggestion, or need assistance with the newsletter, please contact us at AIMS@fao.org. You received this message because you are subscribed to the AIMS Newsletter