The full report of the first BDE workshop on “Big Data for Food, Agriculture and Forestry” is available here.

Overall, what came out of the discussions was that the special thing about big data in agriculture is its extreme variety. This is what you get, if you contrast the four V’s of big data to the data types and sources that are typically used in agricultural and food research. In most cases we are not talking about an extremely large Volume (other domains have much more voluminous data); it is not that data come with an extremely high Velocity, especially compared to other domains. In many cases, their Veracity is quite high. But in food and agriculture, data Variety matters the most: you need to combine multiple, heterogeneous data types and formats from several sources, trying to solve the information problems and support decision making of the relevant stakeholders.

However, real cases where volume and velocity were high were reported. The discussion indicated that it will be important for the BDE project to more precisely understand the order of magnitude of  the data types discussed in this workshop (e.g. streaming data over decades, genomic data…) and the actual need for big data technologies.

Valeria Pesce (FAO) and Nikos Manouselis (AgroKnow)