Big topics on the pre-meet agenda include rice research data, data access and availability, and agricultural data interoperability  

IGAD – the Interest Group on Agricultural Data which operates as part of the Research Data Alliance (RDA), is hosting two days of pre-conference meetings 28 – 29^th Feb ahead of the RDA 7^th Plenary (RDA P7) conference 1st – 3rd March 2016.

Following the pre-meeting there’ll be two IGAD feedback sessions during the Plenary (Tuesday 1 March from 11.30 – 16:00) where the Group will discuss its findings and collaboration with the Global Open Data in Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN).

Pre-meeting agenda highlights

It’s a busy schedule with talks taking up a day and a half.

The bulk of the first morning looks at rice research data interoperability, including talks on India’s Rice Knowledge Management Portal; ways of improving interoperability through data and databases (International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), and updates on crop ontology from Bioversity, France.

Thailand’s Kasetsart University will be talking about ontology design and its impact on farmer approaches to rice production and cost optimization.  

The other big topic of the day is increasing data access and availability.  We’ll take a look at agricultural knowledge data-sharing systems from China, USA and Japan; how field sensor network is becoming an important data source for data-driven agriculture, and an Agriculture Early Warning system based on collective intelligence, being developed in the Asian pacific.

Elsewhere, the meeting is a chance to shine a light on how previous RDA outputs have been applied in the agricultural community, with feedback from the RDA and WheatIS recommendations for Wheat Data Interoperability.

Under the theme of Agricultural Data Interoperability, we’ll be hearing from AgGateway – a non profit agricultural consortium of businesses;  BayerCrop Science Belgium, about semantic web technologies; and Bioversity, France on AgroPortal ontology-based services. 

Johannes Keizer (FAO of the United Nations, Italy) will be giving an update on GACS (Global Agricultural Concept Scheme) – its evolution and progress toward a metadata ecosystem, ‘AgriSemantics’.  And Laura Meggiolaro (Land Portal, Italy) is set to wrap the first day of talks with insights into the Open Development Platform in the Mekong.

The same discussion groups are set to run through the second morning, before IGAD presents its findings at two feedback sessions in the Plenary.

For more in-depth information take a look at the complete IGAD pre-meeting agenda here.  Watch out for further updates  too – we’ll be blogging after the IGAD pre meet and RDA P7 with some of the meeting highlights.