Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Talking about open data during the 4th Panhellenic Congress for the Development of Greek Agriculture

GAIA EPICHEIREIN held its 4th Panhellenic Congress for the Development of Greek Agriculture (brief description in English here) at Thessaloniki, Greece between 9 and 10 of November 2017. This year, the Congress was themed "Innovation & Knowledge in the primary sector: Releasing the dynamic of rural areas".



The aim of the Congress was to highlight the importance of innovation and knowledge not only for improving agricultural entrepreneurship and competitiveness of the Greek agricultural sector - and at the same time, but also in addressing effectively EU challenges like food security and the production of safe food products, the protection of the environment, mitigating climate change etc.

On Thursday, November 9th, in the context of the Congress, I participated in a Workshop titled "Digitization in the food supply chain". There, I had the opportunity to talk about the recent advances of data collection, analysis and processing in the agrifood sector. My presentation was aimed mostly at those not familiar with the concept of open data in agriculture and the importance of data in modern agricultural systems like smart farming. I provided the background, info on the types and sources of open data and presented the use case of NEUROPUBLIC, as one of the organizations making use of both open and not open data for building data-powered services that serve different needs of the agrifood sector (ranging from smart farming advisory services to CAP support and agricultural insurance ones).

I even had the opportunity to briefly mention GODAN as the main initiative working towards the facilitation of publication and use of open data in the fields of agriculture and nutrition and the entity to facilitate the networking of various open data stakeholders.



What I really found interesting was the fact that speakers before me referred to the importance and role of data in different aspects of the agrifood chain without highlighting the role of the availability and accessibility of data as open data - this allowed me to make references to the previous presentations and explain that without open data, almost none of these would have been possible.

All in all, it was another positive experience and yet another opportunity for me to talk about open data - focusing on real applications and impact on agriculture and food production.

No comments:

Post a Comment