GFAR participates in coordination with FAO in the GODAN Action project funded by DFID.

Among the things for which GFAR is responsible in the project, is the Map of agri-food data standards.
The map was launched in September 2016. Since then, many new data standards have been added: 94 new standards since January 2017, for a total of 370 as of 20/08/2017.

In an interesting post by Hugo Besemer on the Wageningen University blog, “Vocabularies and the ‘I’ in 'FAIR Data principles’”, the objective of the map is nicely stated: “So to go one step further to make our data FAIR we need to know which vocabularies can be used to describe the model for our data. The VEST registry [the map] attempts to bring all that together. It is the first tangible product from the Global Open data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN).”

The Map also tries to provide some assessment metadata to help potential adopters identify the most authoritative, endorsed, open and usable standards. This is work in progress, and input from expert is highly desirable.

The current highlight of the Map is however the new focus this year on the first thematic topic of the project: weather data standards, with special attention to the use case of weather data standards relevant for use in farm management systems. Look at the new thematic page on “Geospatial data + Weather / meteorological data + Farm management data”.

More updates in 2018, with focus on two new topics: nutrition data and land data.