August 11, 2023

IDSA Hub in Poland: Pioneering data spaces for agriculture

IDSA has established a network of hubs across 10 European countries, fostering data sharing and collaboration. The main purpose of these hubs, including a new one in Poland, is to raise awareness of data spaces and address the market needs for data sharing.

The Polish IDSA Hub is facilitated by PSNC (Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center), a leading data center, network operator and e-infrastructure provider in Poland. Working with government administrations, research institutions, and businesses, PSNC is also a significant supporter of scientific communities across Europe. With its involvement in over 300 projects, PSNC brings a lot of experience to the table. And as the hub facilitator, the IDSA member helps to build a community interested in data spaces in smart agriculture, smart cities, and Industry 4.0.

Marcin Płóciennik, head of the IoT systems department at PSNC, focuses on the agriculture domain. He is part of a team that is developing and implementing platforms for data sharing, services, and innovative applications for agriculture. PSNC already participates in several projects related to interoperable data spaces, such as AgriDataSpace and DEMETER. The center is also co-developing the Agriculture Information Model (AIM), a domain-specific data model and ontology that ensures semantic interoperability between data and various components. AIM integrates multiple data sources, such as IoT, open data, geographical and satellite imagery. With its use farmers receive access to information and tools necessary to optimize agricultural processes. And it enables software producers and data providers to reach potential customers for their products and services.

Together with the AgriDataSpace project, the hub organized workshops to present the concept of IDS-based data spaces, the needs and benefits and explains how this is done in different countries. The efforts and assets of IDSA were showcased there, offering everyone the opportunity to become part of this exceptional IDSA ecosystem.

Promoting best practices, standards, and certification of data space components is central to IDSA. Therefore, each hub gains access to a community that already has practical experience in deploying data spaces. This helps replicate success stories, and understand where current limitations are.

In agriculture and agrifood data quality is very important. It is crucial, because if data about food is wrong, then food safety is in danger. Within the DATAMITE project, IDSA and PSNC are developing several tools that besides sharing will allow evaluating and improving the quality of the data. The project is aiming to build a basic data marketplace in the agriculture domain together with multiple partners, using IDS standards and components, to monetize data but also to promote data sharing.

To maximize the impact of digitization within agriculture, PSNC and its partners are starting an agri-food testing and experimenting facility (AgriFoodTEF project). This provides services that help assess and validate AI and robotics solutions under real-world conditions. The project is currently analyzing different available data spaces solutions and aims to build essential components while establishing a testbed for companies to test their innovations.

In this dynamic landscape, the collaboration between IDSA and PSNC shines a light on the transformative power of data spaces in reshaping industries and fostering innovation for a better future.

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