Advancing syntactic and semantic interoperability for data in the agricultural and food industries

Supervisors: Assoc Prof Peter Dahlhaus, Dr Nathan Robinson, Dr Birgita Hansen, and Simon Cox

Industry advisor: Mr Cam Nicolson

Research overview

Access to data provides the fuel for next generation decision support systems, and opportunities for sharing data across national and international borders, and across government, industry and academic sectors, have never been greater. While the global movement towards making data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) has been rapidly adopted in some domains, it has been lagging in the agricultural and food industries.

However, collecting more data and increasing its availability is only part of the solution to the major challenges, as there are limitations in how to transform these data into pragmatic actions to, for example, improve soil, plant and water management; or product marketing. These limitations are largely due to the distributed custodianship and heterogeneity of agricultural data, making it difficult for an end-user to discover, access and harmonise the data. Although there may be an impressive volume of global agricultural data available, few users have the capacity or desire to overcome these difficulties and extract value from the data.

This project will adopt the latest international advances in syntactic and semantic interoperability to develop standardised data streams from disparate sources to enrich decision support systems used within the agricultural and food industries.