In my brainstorming meeting yesterday with colleagues from INIT, we developed the idea of a project with the working title "a Linked  Open Data Infrastructure for Food Safety Tracing". The idea was inspired by the recent scandals in Germany about dioxin in eggs and pigg meat.

We want to pursue this on two different lines:

a)  We are not aiming for a research project, but for a proposal how governments could get a better grasp on foodchain data and possible contaminations:

 The project would have the following parts:

• design of a tracing system on food safety throughout the production chain based on LOD technology
• mobilization, creation and publication of all needed standard semantics and vocabularies
• proposals for necessary provisions to force producers to open data
• a prototype, which would show the power of the system

The project would get an international dimension through the participation of FAO and Chinese partners, who are equally interested in food safety issues.

b) Writing a research project for the last call of FP7 with the same topics, but including some research on issues that still under evolution

Decisions made:

• jk will write two promotional paragraphs to explain the project
• Init will contact possible German donors
• jk will contact Chinese partners to find out their interests
• jk will contact academic partners to see the possibility of an FP7 project

Related articles

• Open Data + Food Ontology+ Semantic Web Primer (foodandtechconnect.com)
• A Year of Open Government Data: Transparency, but also Innovation (blogs.talis.com)