On February 20th 2017, we had the pleasure to host a workshop at the premises of the Agricultural University of Athens (AUA), co-organized together with the colleagues from the Laboratory of Viticulture.
Delegates from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), and more specifically from the Agricultural Information Institute and the National Science Library, were also invited to present their research activities and the Big Data infrastructures that are being implemented in CAAS, in the scope of also exchanging knowledge, experience and ideas.
The workshop provided us with the excellent opportunity to present our use case pilot demonstrator, “VITIS”, that is being developed by Agroknow with support from the BigDataEurope Horizon 2020 project. VITIS exploits core technologies for serving specific real-world problems of the Viticulture Research Community by assessing research results produced through Basic and Applied Research. If anything and above all, research is a data-driven process, and although huge volumes of data may be compelling at a first glance, they are meaningless to the end-user without an interpretive structure.
Some of the key features of VITIS were presented, showcasing how the grapevine-powered industry is indeed addressing cross-sector problems by using a data spectrum extremely heterogeneous and big, including satellite, weather, genomic, phenotypic data to name a few. Data which fall in one or more of the four well known “V” categories of Big Data, Volume, Velocity, Variety, Veracity. Data which ultimately have to be turned into Value.
The workshop also included a small tour in the Experimental and Educational Vineyard of the Agricultural University of Athens, with the aim to show our Chinese colleagues the live picture behind the VITIS demonstrator, a direct view of where data combining both volume and variety are being produced: in the field.
More VITIS components and features are being developed as we speak, so stay tuned!