CoP technical session: Interoperability of socio-economic data

October 17, 2:00PM

Since the start of the community of practice on socio-economic data , one of the first things that emerged from the discussions was the recognition that any form of standardization in the socio-economic domain was conspicuously absent. In an effort to redress the challenges facing socio-economic data reuse and data interoperability, three working groups emerged. The working group 100Q focused on identifying key indicators and related questions that are commonly used and could be used as a standard approach to ensure data sets are comparable over time and space. The working group SociO! focused on the development of a socio-economic ontology with accepted standardized terms to be used in controlled vocabularies linked to socio-economic data sets. The working group OIMS focused on the development of a flexible and extensible, ontology-agnostic, human-intelligible and machine-readable metadata schema to accompany socio-economic data sets.

Recently the work of 100Q was completed with the report “Towards a core approach for cross-sectional farm household survey data collection: a tiered setup for quantifying key farm and livelihood indicators”. (download report)

Information on the socio-economic ontology SociO! is vailable through the CoP SED website.

More information on OIMS can be found through the CoP SED website

Identity and ethics of the digital age in agriculture

(part of the session Ethical delimmas of the digital age in agriculture)

October 17 8:30 - 9:15

Data and digital tools have the potential to accelerate a much-needed transformation of the agricultural sector. As has been famously said before, with great power comes great responsibility – thus democratization of benefits accruing from the generation of data-driven services and products is a common theme, as is individual protection and control over personal data. In the agriculture sector, this increasingly means farmers needing to be able to control access to and use of data that concerns them. Fast paced digital transformation is disruptive and raises concerns that norms are changing faster than they can be codified to address undesirable consequences – thus democratization of benefits accruing from the generation of data-driven services and products is a common concern, as is individual protection and control over personal data.

Regulators the world over are intervening to protect privacy and individual rights, and yet just over a year out from the most definitive intervention — Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) unforeseen consequences of the legislation are already emerging (silencing press, favoring incumbents, legal fragmentation and uncertainty, and high compliance costs), raising many questions: What is ethical? What is practical? How can we navigate these trends to transform our sector?

Knowledge management has been recognized as a critical enabling factor for healthy agri-food systems, required to generate contextual information, processes and experiences, in order to improve productivity, increase profitability, reliability and resilience. Blockchain technology for data management ensures maximum transparency and protection / confidentiality in the collection, sharing and use of contributor data. This guarantees the customer the traceability (origin, acquisition methods, etc.), the validity (maintenance of data) and the exploitability of all data exchanged and used. In this session on technologies and practices for privacy and self sovereign identity: there will be some messages from key players working on this topic who are unable to attend in person, Monique Morrow (https://www.moniquemorrow.com/humanized-internet), and Emmanuel Aldeguer (https://smartfarmers.org/). Jim Wilgenbusch will give a short introduction on mapping regulations and frameworks for responsible data to international technical standards. Gideon Kruseman coordinates the informal group of CGIAR IRB folks and pushing an agenda for better privacy protection while ensuring the maximum possible level of open data. He will discuss implications of what is happening in terms of privacy safeguards for international agricultural research. Rama Iyer will highlight an ongoing effort on using blockchain to anonomize a 30 year village household survey on food security while still enabling wider research.

Organized jointly between the CGIAR Platform for Big data in Agriculture and BlockXpert.co. details coming soon