The most recent webinar part of the Research Data Alliance Interest Group for Agricultural Data (IGAD)’s new Coffee Break initiative took place on 22 September titled Data innovation and semantics are crucial to the future of animal health and featured Georgina Cherry, from the Veterinary Health Innovation Engine (vHive) team at the University of Surrey. 

The Veterinary Health Innovation Engine (vHive), a research centre dedicated to the development and adoption of new digital technologies, in collaboration with Zoetis, ATC and University of Exeter, have built a customized digital platform called The Data Innovation Hub for Animal Health (DIHAH). DIHAH is a unique, global repository for different data drawn from all sectors in animal health that will facilitate mutual data and knowledge sharing between industry partners in a secure environment.

During this webinar, Georgina introduced the DIHAH user community, more about the innovative platform, including its catalogue of open datasets and other data that can be used for research purposes under licence. Furthermore, the webinar explained how DIHAH is intended as a comprehensive “one-stop shop” for data in the sector. Data gathering is an ongoing process and the datasets added to the catalogue are being used to create a prototype livestock taxonomy to aid dataset discoverability on the platform. 

Also, as an extension to this, how vHive is collaborating with Livestock Data for Decisions (LD4D) and the Global Burden of Animal Diseases (GBADs) to validate automated content tagging tools created by the Bayes Centre at the University of Edinburgh and to build a livestock taxonomy to submit to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation (FAO)’s AGROVOC, the largest Linked open data set about agriculture available for public use.