AIMS Agricultural
Information
Management
Standards

GODAN Working Groups

Currently, nearly 800 million people struggle with debilitating hunger and malnutrition and can be found in every corner of the globe. That’s one in every nine people, with the majority being women and children.

A core principle behind Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) - launched in 2012 - is that a solution to Zero Hunger (Sustainable Development Goal 2) lies within existing, but often unavailable, agriculture and nutrition data.

GODAN  supports the proactive sharing of open data to deal with the urgent challenge of ensuring world food security. In particular, GODAN provides a global space, where partners could collaborate, share ideas, experiences and work forward on how to make relevant data in agriculture and nutrition available, accessible, responsible, and reusable worldwide.

GODAN action is focused on enhancing data standards and promoting best practices improving interoperability of data in agri-food domain.

Below are GODAN Working Groups (WGs) engaged in development of products and promotion of activities related to data interoperability and data sharing:

  1. Kenya Data Integration WG draws on ideas from open data integration initiative in Kenya. The group aims at defining the best ways to develop and implement a comprehensive data integration approach in Kenya linking up data from various sources (e.g., satellites, drones, FAO, Ministry of Agriculture, etc.) in the country. Such a system will allow both Government and farmers to take the most appropriate and responsible decisions in managing food production in Kenya.
  2. Data Infrastructure WG consists of a number of partners - including Syngenta and the Open Data Institute (ODI). This WG is collaborating to define a vision for sustainable data infrastructures needed for the global agritech sector. At the heart of such a data ecosystem lies trusted and interoperable data supporting the ‘grand challenges’ in the sector.
  3. Soil Data WG promotes the sharing of soil-related open data through web services. The group closely interacts with other initiatives (OGC, ISO Soil ML) related to the development of open soil standards promoting global harmonisation and exchange of digital soil data. This WG has the vision to become the key driver for building a soil e-infrastructure focused on various aspects of the soil data life cycle.
  4. Capacity Development WG is going to promote agriculture and nutrition open data knowledge, to advocate for collaborative efforts through knowledge sharing among capacity development activities, as well as to increase awareness of ongoing open data initiatives, innovations, good practices and lessons learned that enable use and reuse of open data.