La pertinence des données météo ouvertes pour les services de conseils agrométéorologiques [Éthiopie]

L'utilisation de données ouvertes dans le domaine de la météorologie pourrait répondre aux besoins d'information des systèmes de conseils agrométérologiques. Mais les données ouvertes sont-elles parfaitement adaptées ? Sont-elles fiables, pertinentes, actuelles et disponibles ? Le projet CommonSense en faveur des petits exploitants d'Éthiopie fournit des éléments de réponse à ces questions

WASOS: An Ontology for Modelling Traditional Knowledge of Sustainable Water Stewardship

Recent work and publications concerning sustainable water stewardship in Rajasthan (India) highlight how contemporary challenges are eroding traditional, communal approaches to water stewardship through mechanised extraction beyond the renewable capacities of ecosystems. Our work is focused on developing a formal ontology for modelling the knowledge of traditional water stewardship in India’s drylands by capturing the key constitutional elements of regenerative methods. Our method follows an iterative evolving prototype process for delivering the first version of the Ontology for Sustainable Water Stewardship (WASOS). The ontology contains a moderate number of high-level classes and properties that represent the water management decisionmaking process. By making key relationships visible, we aim to support decision-making in complex catchments particularly where there are contested urban and rural claims on water

User centered design: Tools for encouraging climate change adaptation

Climate change and it's societal response in the form of mitigation and adaptation strategies have potentially very large impacts in different sectors, especially on regions with a high vulnerability. Climate change will greatly affect agricultural and natural ecosystems and urban centers. The scale and complexity of the interactions represent a challenge for policy makers, researchers and the public at large. It is the role of the policy maker at different levels of government to facilitate and encourage adaptation and to achieve the level of transparency needed to obtain the public support for taking far-reaching measures. The European Climate Adaptation Platform Climate-ADAPT supports Europe in adapting to climate change by providing information and knowledge on expected climate change, current and future vulnerability of regions and sectors; letting users learn from each other's national and transnational adaptation strategies, adaptation case studies and potential adaptation options and, guidance on how to plan for adaptation. The platform was developed through an intensive collaboration with stakeholders, climate adaptation experts, a steering committee and the donor in 1.5 years. Different groups provided feedback at different time intervals ranging from biweekly teleconferences to quarterly workshops. The close collaboration promoted buy-in, an ongoing commitment of users and donors and several champions promoting the platform. In the first three months of the project a scoping document and a software concept were created using semi-structured interviews and wire-frames. During the development phase evolutionary prototypes were used to elicit feedback in the form of comments, paper sketches and story boards to be i mplemented in the following increment. In this process insights changed, new tools were conceived and some early ideas were dropped.</p

The suitability of existing open data weather data for agro-meteo advisory [Ethiopia]

Open data in the weather domain could address the information needs of agro-meteo farm advisory systems. However, is open data ‘fit-for-purpose'; does it match the needs of being reliable, relevant, timely and accessible? Some answers come from the CommonSense project targeting smallholder farmers in Ethiopia

User centered design: Tools for encouraging climate change adaptation

Climate change and it's societal response in the form of mitigation and adaptation strategies have potentially very large impacts in different sectors, especially on regions with a high vulnerability. Climate change will greatly affect agricultural and natural ecosystems and urban centers. The scale and complexity of the interactions represent a challenge for policy makers, researchers and the public at large. It is the role of the policy maker at different levels of government to facilitate and encourage adaptation and to achieve the level of transparency needed to obtain the public support for taking far-reaching measures. The European Climate Adaptation Platform Climate-ADAPT supports Europe in adapting to climate change by providing information and knowledge on expected climate change, current and future vulnerability of regions and sectors; letting users learn from each other's national and transnational adaptation strategies, adaptation case studies and potential adaptation options and, guidance on how to plan for adaptation. The platform was developed through an intensive collaboration with stakeholders, climate adaptation experts, a steering committee and the donor in 1.5 years. Different groups provided feedback at different time intervals ranging from biweekly teleconferences to quarterly workshops. The close collaboration promoted buy-in, an ongoing commitment of users and donors and several champions promoting the platform. In the first three months of the project a scoping document and a software concept were created using semi-structured interviews and wire-frames. During the development phase evolutionary prototypes were used to elicit feedback in the form of comments, paper sketches and story boards to be i mplemented in the following increment. In this process insights changed, new tools were conceived and some early ideas were dropped.</p

Analysis of Big Data technologies for use in agro-environmental science

Recent developments like the movements of open access and open data and the unprecedented growth of data, which has come forward as Big Data, have shifted focus to methods to effectively handle such data for use in agro-environmental research. Big Data technologies, together with the increased use of cloud based and high performance computing, create new opportunities for data intensive science in the multi-disciplinary agro-environmental domain. A theoretical framework is presented to structure and analyse data-intensive cases and is applied to three case studies, together covering a broad range of technologies and aspects related to Big Data usage. The case studies indicate that most persistent issues in the area of data-intensive research evolve around capturing the huge heterogeneity of interdisciplinary data and around creating trust between data providers and data users. It is therefore recommended that efforts from the agro-environmental domain concentrate on the issues of variety and veracity

Improving access to big data in agriculture and forestry using semantic technologies

To better understand and manage the interactions of agriculture and natural resources, for example under current increasing societal demands and climate changes, agro-environmental research must bring together an ever growing amount of data and information from multiple science domains. Data that is inherently large, multi-dimensional and heterogeneous, and requires computational intensive processing. Thus, agro-environmental researchers must deal with specific Big Data challenges in efficiently acquiring the data fit to their job while limiting the amount of computational, network and storage resources needed to practical levels. Automated procedures for collection, selection, annotation and indexing of data and metadata are indispensable in order to be able to effectively exploit the global network of available scientific information. This paper describes work performed in the EU FP7 Trees4Future and SemaGrow projects that contributes to development and evaluation of an infrastructure that allows efficient discovery and unified querying of agricultural and forestry resources using Linked Data and semantic technologies

Criteria for use case specification and documentation for data exchange harmonization

agriXchange network for data exchange in agriculture -hankkeen julkaisuvokKV