GFAR is participating in the agINFRA project (http://aginfra.eu) of the European Commission (EC 7th framework program INFRA-2011-1.2.2). The project aims at “developing a shared infrastructure and computationally empowered services for agricultural research data”, with a strong focus on “achieving a higher level of interoperability”.

The reason why GFAR participates in the project is that improving the interoperability of agricultural data has always been one of the main objectives of GFAR’s activities around “opening access to knowledge” and one of the key issues in the CIARD movement of which GFAR is a co-founder. 

 

Besides, GFAR wanted its CIARD RING service to develop based on the actual needs of data providers and data consumers: the agINFRA consortium consists of several data providers and a few data consumers that the RING serves and is a first very good use case for the service.

 

A quick overview of the project and the role of the RING in it can be found in the project’s FAQ page: http://www.aginfra.eu/en/component/content/article/25-the-project/425-frequently-asked-questions.

              
Not being a legal entity, GFAR participates in the project through FAO. GFAR has an advisory role in the project and contributes the CIARD RING as the central directory of datasets for the project.

As leader of Work Package 5 in the project ("Data Policies, Workflows, Interoperability and Integration") together with FAO, GFAR has to coordinate activities around data workflows and Linked Data interoperability.