Europe Region — Data Interoperability in Focus

Regional Updates

Europe Region — Data Interoperability in Focus

By Conny Graumans, AgGateway Europe Director

Final preparations are underway for next week’s AgGateway Europe Region Year-End Seminar. Chaired by Klaus-Hebert Rolf of Class and 365FarmNet, the seminar will take place on Thursday 7 December from 9:00 - 16:00 CET (Paris) in Brussels at the Saxony-Anhalt EU offices. If you are attending and have not signed up, you can do so here.

In the meantime, I have had some time to process all the information and networking we were able to do while working in the AgGateway booth at the Agritechnica in Hamburg, Germany last month. It was very successful, as we were able to connect with many member companies, partner organizations, and prospective members from throughout Europe and around the world.

One significant topic of interest across many of the connectivity stakeholders we talked to was agricultural data – in particular, how does data interchange become more seamless across companies and industry segments. Several universities, research institutes, and private companies are wrapping their minds around this level of functionality, and where is the best place to start the work.

Right now, we are still struggling with a universal definition of a data space. Some consider it a centralized database with all the data that are relevant for the farmer. I believe a better definition of the agricultural data space is “a framework of agreements for the agricultural sector about how multiple data providers and multiple data consumers should share and use data in a safe and secure way.” This framework would cover all interoperability layers and also touch on authentication, authorization and cybersecurity.

Common interoperability layers cover semantics (data definitions, class models), identifiers (for crop fields, animals, legal entities, etc.), controlled vocabularies (standard code lists), syntaxis (xml, json), and protocols (SOAP, REST (OpenAPI))

In Europe, the iShare architecture (https://ishare.eu/) is an example of a blueprint for developing a data space (see the image below). Also, the AEF (Agricultural Industry Electronics Foundation) AgIN project (Agriculture Interoperability Network) could be considered as an example of a Data Space.

Recently AgGateway Europe signed up for the stakeholder group for the EU project AgriDataSpace (https://agridataspace-csa.eu/), with the intention to help develop the agricultural Data Space for Europe. AgGateway is also working with AEF to utilize the ADAPT Standard to support several of the use cases for AgIN.

There is much more work to be done, and I look forward to sharing updates as work progresses.