agINFRA: creating a data infrastructure to support agricultural communities
agINFRA is a European innovative Integrated Infrastructure Initiative (I3) project - launched November 2011 - that will introduce agricultural scientific communities to the vision of open and participatory data-intensive science. To achieve this aim, agINFRA will design and develop a scientific data infrastructure for agricultural sciences that will facilitate the development of policies and services that promote the sharing of data among agricultural scientists in a manner that develops trust within and amongst their communities.
Through the establishment of an open and interoperable data e-Infrastructure, agINFRA will remove existing obstacles concerning sharing, processing and accessing scientific information and data in agriculture, as well as improve the preparedness of agricultural scientific communities to face, manage and exploit the ever-increasing abundance of multi-disciplinary data that is available to support agricultural research.
Ultimately, agINFRA will demonstrate how a data e-Infrastructure for agricultural scientific communities can be set up to facilitate data generation, provenance, quality assessment, certification, curation, annotation, navigation and management.
Goals and Objectives
The agINFRA project represents a unique opportunity for the innovation and transfer of scientific and technological results in the agricultural field into real outcomes that help improve scientific community-driven policy development and service deployment for data generation, management and sharing. The key goals and corresponding project objectives are as follows:
1. Increased sharing and federation of agricultural data
- Successfully deploy an open infrastructure for the transfer of digital agricultural content
- Include in the infrastructure resources ranging from raw observational and experimental data through to publications
- Promote the sharing of data amongst the wider scientific community to build trust
- Ensure outcomes significantly advance the state-of-the art in agricultural e-infrastructures
2. Efficient data management in the agricultural research process
- Ensure stakeholder needs are met with regards to data management and sharing
- Involve as many agricultural data sources as possible to provide maximum value
- Facilitate easier curation, certification, annotation, navigation and management of data
- Create new opportunities for data intensive research in the agricultural domain
3. Deployment of robust European service infrastructure for scientific agricultural data
- Deploy tools for collaboration between European institutions in data-intensive research
- Validate the approach by enabling users to interact with each other and the data
- Identify gaps in standards that will be needed to guarantee the integrity/authenticity of data
- Establish specific and realistic indicators to measure success
4. High interoperability between agricultural and other data resources
- Improve interoperability between existing e-infrastructures
- Successfully interconnect agricultural data repositories and extended metadata
- Advance implementation and adoption of Europeana standards and specifications
Partners
The agINFRA Consortium unites world-leading scientific and technical research institutes, specialist SMES and agricultural enterprises and NGOs, including one of the main players in the agricultural information community - the Food & Agricultural Organisation of the UN – to design, develop and promote a scientific data infrastructure for agricultural sciences. Each partner brings relevant, high quality experience to the team, ranging from major agricultural data bases and in-depth data infrastructure design and deployment skills through to first-hand domain expertise in agricultural sciences, an extensive understanding of European project requirements and a proven track record in training and capacity building.
Collectively, the agINFRA Consortium as whole provides a one-stop-shop of agricultural subject matter, data repository and e-Infrastructure expertise:
Collectively, the agINFRA Consortium as whole provides a one-stop-shop of agricultural subject matter, data repository and e-Infrastructure expertise:
| Partner No. | Partner Name | Country | Main Skills & Role(s) |
| 1 | University of Alcala (UAH) | Spain | Scientific Coordination, VOA3R federation data/content aggregator, Semantic repository federation technologies/services |
| 2 | Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations | Italy | Virtual data infrastructure provider, data/content aggregator and provider |
| 3 | National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) | Italy | e-Infrastructure/grid integration and hosting |
| 4 | Salzburg Research (SR) | Austria | Stakeholder needs analysis for ICT-services, requirements engineering and evaluation: Semantic collaboration and knowledge management technologies/services |
| 5 | IPB - Institute of Physics, Belgrade | Serbia | e-Infrastructure/grid integration and hosting |
| 6 | Computer and Automation Research Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA SZTAKI) | Hungary | Virtual portal engine layer |
| 7 | Agro-Know Technologies | Greece | Social navigation technologies/services |
| 8 | 21 Consultancy (21c) | UK | Dissemination & awareness |
| 9 | Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral (ESPOL) | Ecuador | Application developer |
| 10 | ALL | China | Data/content aggregator and provider, agricultural subject matter expertise |
| 11 | The Open University | UK | Data processing and linguistic analysis of agricultural literature. |
Website
www.aginfra-project.eu is currently under construction ready for a January 2012 launch.
