Agrimetrics guarantees ‘FAIR’ data in H2020 Green Deal bids

Increase the chance of securing Horizon 2020 funding by collaborating with Agrimetrics, whose Data Marketplace provides a shortcut to meeting H2020’s FAIR data requirements.

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The European Commission (EC) has launched a €1billion fund for research and innovation projects that protect Europe’s ecosystems and biodiversity and respond to the ‘climate crisis’.

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“The Green Deal call is the last and biggest call under Horizon 2020 (H2020). With innovation at its heart, this investment will accelerate just and sustainable transition to a climate-neutral Europe by 2050.”

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Mariya Gabriel

EU Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education, and Youth

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The European Commission (EC) has launched a €1billion fund for research and innovation projects that protect Europe’s ecosystems and biodiversity and respond to the ‘climate crisis’.

1. Achieve climate-neutral farms
2. Achieve climate-neutral food businesses
3. Reduce dependence on continuous pesticides, antibiotics, and fertilisers
4. Reduce food loss/waste, while avoiding unstainable packaging
5. Shift to sustainable health diets
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“These challenges mimic Agrimetrics’s priorities. We’ve worked with WRAP on reducing food waste, BASF on optimising pesticide applications, and Natural England on sustainability accounting. Our capabilities and expertise are perfectly positioned to advance projects targeting these challenges – and to help secure funding.”

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Given the urgency of these challenges, the EC has stated that bids should provide clear and discernible results in the short to medium-term. Therefore, the ability to ‘hit the ground running’ is likely to be an important factor when judging applications.

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Dr Matthew Smith

Chief Product Officer, Agrimetrics

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Is your H2020 Data Management Plan FAIR?

H2020 projects are required to develop a Data Management Plan (DMP) and – where possible – provide access to research data. Though not a requirement, the EC promotes following a FAIR data framework.

DMP is a formal document that specifies: the data the research will generate; how the to ensure data curation, preservation and sustainability; and what parts of that data will be open (and how). The EC recommends this document is produced before project kick-off and continuously updated as the project evolves.

“Since 2016, many now consider it pointless to apply for H2020 funding without a FAIR data management plan.”

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Dr Derek Scuffell

Chief Data Architect, Knowmatics

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The Agri-food Data Marketplace offers an elegant and simple way to make data FAIR

The Data Marketplace deploys the latest linked-data technologies, powerful permissioning, and ISO27001 accreditation to provide organisations with a safe and equitable way to manage and share their data. This advances the notion of FAIR data in several ways:

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Findable

The Marketplace enables users to access analysis-ready, pre-linked data from dozens of suppliers with a single query.

Innovative search tools make it easier for users to find the data they need. Linked-Data Explorer is a visual interface that enables concept-based searching; for example, a search for a ‘crop’ would automatically highlight related data, e.g. ‘weather’, ‘soil type’, ‘field boundaries’.

GraphQL is another search tool. It allows users to easily build custom datasets from dozens of data sources. This data can be accessed via an API underpinned by DCAT standards and citable by DOI.These tools – which sit alongside a conventional catalogue of datasets – make data significantly more discoverable to a wide range of users, even if those users were originally unaware of the data’s existence.

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Accessible

Marketplace users can opt to hold their data in a Private Exchange invisible to the public. From here, powerful layers of permissioning enables data owners to provide controlled access to specified organisations or individuals – or make data discoverable to a wider audience.

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The Data Marketplace provides an advanced publishing infrastructure that enables models and data to be shared without fear of losing control.

Descriptions of the data, metadata, and its relations to other marketplace data can be made publicly available even if access to the actual data is controlled.

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Interoperable

The Data Marketplace is constructed on top of semantically enriched, linked-data knowledge graphs. By leveraging this infrastructure, data can be combined more efficiently. Once combined, data is easily understood across various organisations.

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Interoperability Case Study

In 2019, Agrimetrics joined the SmartCow consortium led by the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), which included 10 institutes and spanned 30 pan-European projects.

The goal was to increase the range of possible analysis by sharing and combining data from across the various research institutes. For example, to combine data from different types of methane emission sensor to improve understanding of how diet impacts the release of greenhouse gas on dairy farms.

Data from the 10 institutions were organised on a dedicated knowledge graph within a Private Exchange on Agrimetrics Data Marketplace. The Exchange was easily queryable via GraphQL. Users could quickly generate an analysis-ready dataset containing information from all 10 institutes, accessible via API.

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Reusable

The Data Marketplace not only ensures data remains reusable well into the future, but also that the value of that data increases.

As the Data Marketplace and underlying Knowledge Graph grows, the volume of relevant information connected to the original data grows too. From a users’ perspective, this means significant time and cost savings; fewer data suppliers have to be engaged with and data transformation is kept to a minimum.

Furthermore, Agrimetrics is a Microsoft Partner, ISO27001 accredited, and the Data Marketplace is built with Microsoft’s Azure technology; users needn’t worry about out-of-date integrations or technologies impacting the long-term reusability of their data.

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Open to consortia

If you would like to find out more about how Agrimetrics and the Agri-food Data Marketplace can strengthen H2020 bids, then please contact us.

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Make your H2020 bid FAIR

Talk to our team about how Agrimetrics can increase the chance of securing Horizon 2020 funding by by providing a shortcut to meeting H2020’s FAIR data requirements.

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Contact us

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About Agrimetrics

Agrimetrics is the food and farming sector’s Data Marketplace. We enable organisations to safely share and monetise their data, whilst making it easier for data-consumers to access the information they need. Our goal is to help create a more productive and sustainable food system by enabling next-generation solutions as quickly and affordably as possible.

We are one of four centres for agricultural innovation founded with an initial investment from Innovate UK. Our founding partners are NIAB, SRUC, Rothamsted Research and The University of Reading. We have strategic partnerships with Airbus and Microsoft and are a participant in Microsoft’s prestigious AI for Earth programme.

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The four centres
The Agri-Tech Centres are a unique collaboration between Government, academia and industry created to drive greater efficiency, resilience and wealth across the agrifood sector. A £90m investment from the UK’s strategic innovation agency (Innovate UK) is enabling the Centres to harness leading UK research and expertise as well as build new infrastructures and innovation. They include CHAP (Crop Health and Protection), CIEL (Centre for Innovation Excellence in Livestock), Agri-EPI (Engineering and Precision Technologies), and Agrimetrics.

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