GFAR is participating in the H2020 "Big Data Europe" project together with FAO.

On 22 September, the first BDE workshop on "Big data for food, agriculture and forestry: opportunities and challenges" took place and now the full report is available here: BDE-SC2-1st-workshop-Finalreport.

Overall, what came out of the discussions was that the special thing about big data in agriculture is its extreme variety. This is what you get, if you contrast the four V’s of big data (Volume, Velocity, Variety, Veracity) to the data types and sources that are typically used in agricultural and food research. In most cases we are not talking about an extremely large Volume (other domains have much more voluminous data); it is not that data come with an extremely high Velocity, especially compared to other domains. In many cases, their Veracity is quite high. But in food and agriculture, data Variety matters the most: you need to combine multiple, heterogeneous data types and formats from several sources, trying to solve the information problems and support decision making of the relevant stakeholders.

However, real cases where volume and velocity are high were reported. The discussion indicated that it will be important for the BDE project to more precisely understand the order of magnitude of the data types discussed in this workshop (e.g. streaming data over decades, genomic data…) and the actual need for big data technologies.

The next step in societal challenge "food and agriculture"in BDE will be the design of a pilot project using big data technologies developed by the project.
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