agINFRA
A data infrastructure to support agricultural scientific communities: Promoting data sharing and development of trust in agricultural sciences
The agINFRA project is a Framework VII project funded under the Research Infrastructures (Capacities) programme. The project began in October 2011 and will run for three years.
The overarching aim of the project is to introduce agricultural scientific communities to the vision of open and participatory data-intensive science. To achieve this aim, the agINFRA consortium will design and develop a scientific data infrastructure for agricultural sciences that will facilitate the development of policies and services that promote the sharing of data among agricultural scientists in a manner that develops trust within and amongst these communities.
Through the establishment of an open and interoperable data intensive e-infrastructure, the agINFRA consortium will remove existing obstacles concerning sharing, processing and accessing scientific information and data in agriculture, as well as improve the preparedness of agricultural scientific communities to face, manage and exploit the ever-increasing abundance of multi-disciplinary data that is available to support agricultural research.
Ultimately, the agINFRA consortium will demonstrate how a data e-infrastructure for agricultural scientific communities can be set up to facilitate data generation, provenance, quality assessment, certification, curation, annotation, navigation and management.
The project involves a partnership between the following organisations:
- University of Alcala (UAH, Spain) – project co-ordinator
- Food & Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO, Italy)
- National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN, Italy)
- Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft (SRFG, Austria)
- Institute of Physics, Belgrade (IPB, Serbia)
- Computer and Automation Research Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (SZTAKI, Hungary)
- Agro-Know Technologies (A-K, Greece)
- 21c Consultancy (21c, UK)
- Escuela Superior Politecnica del Litoral (ESPOL, Ecuador)
- Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS, China)
- The Open University (OU, UK)
Members of the agINFRA project team at the OU include Anton Dil, David King, Alistair Willis and myself. Our role in the project will be to contribute to the Data Management, Processing, Visualisation & Navigation workpackage in the agINFRA project. Within this workpackage, we will be responsible for developing a service to perform linguistic analysis of agricultural literature. The service will process plain text sources or OCR-scanned literature and provide an XML mark up of the text for use by researchers. Additional components to the service could include the analysis and mark-up of text to facilitate the recovery of, for example, species occurrence data (organism; place; date). The service will also identify bibliographic citations (from which author names can be distinguished in the analysis and mark-up of the text) that can be used to populate a literature service.
Our work on the agINFRA project complements our work on another FP7-funded project, ViBRANT (Virtual Biodiversity Research and Access Network for Taxonomy http://vbrant.eu).