The 2nd SemaGrow Hackathon took place between 4-7/7/2014 at the premises of the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications of NCSR Demokritos, in Athens, Greece. It was organized by Agro-Know, as a partner of the SemaGrow project and collocated with the International Research-Centered Summer School in Cognitive Systems and Interactive Robotics, Data and Content Analysis (IRSS 2014), a fact that allowed the participation of a high number of people with technical background and skills. It was attended by about 40 people from various countries all over the world. You can find information about the 2nd SemaGrow Hackathon here.

The 1st day of the Hackathon (Friday, 4/7/2014) was an Introductory Course, which aimed to provide the necessary background to the Hackathon participants. In this direction, it consisted of a number of introductory presentations on

• The role of the SemaGrow project and its outcomes in this Hackathon (Vangelis Karkaletsis, NCSR Demokritos)
• Agriculture and Food data sources (Vassilis Protonotarios, Agro-Know),
• Linked Data (Antonis Koukourikos, NCSR Demokritos),
• Open Data (Iraklis Varlamis, Harokopio University of Athens),
• Big Data (Antonis Koukourikos, NCSR Demokritos).

It also consisted of a number of hands-on sessions in the evening. You can find all presentations from the 1st day of the event here.

The 2nd day of the Hackathon (Saturday, 5/7/2014) included an introduction by Giannis Stoitsis, Agro-Know COO and a brain-storming session titled “Data+Need=Hack” by Nikos Manolis (Agro-Know), which provided the context into which the Hackathon would take place. After that, it was time for hacking in groups. The participants were encouraged to use the tools, methodologies and data sources / datasets proposed and provided by the SemaGrow and agINFRA projects, such as the SemaGrow SPARQL endpoint, FAO Data & AGRIS Data, CIARD RING, AGROVOC, Agrotagger, etc., but not limited to them.

• Mr. Jan Versteeg, Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Greece & one of the “key” people behind the OrangeGrove Initiative;
• Dimitris Koutsolioutsos, Founder of the Farmers Republic;
• Antonis Koukourikos, Research Associate, Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications, National Center of Scientific Research “Demokritos” and
• Giannis Stoitsis, Chief Operations Officer, Agro-Know

Congratulations to the winning team! You may find photos from the event here and here.

This post was originally published in the Agro-Know blog.