Agroknow

Agroknow (AK) is a fast growing SME specialized in agro-biodiversity knowledge management with a clear research focus on knowledge-intensive technology innovation for agriculture, food and biodiversity. AK deploys customizable and adaptable data harvesting, ingestion, curation and enrichment workflows that reveal and outline the value of the data sources. Combining research-proven quality enhancement and assurance methodologies, specialized software toolkits, as well as demonstrating a deep expertise in data curation for the agricultural and biodiversity sciences. AK helps organizations and people to address societal and environmental challenges using solutions that are informed and enhanced by high-quality data. AK has an extensive experience in building services for the agricultural community.

AK is following European and international standardisation initiatives in relation to the agricultural data representation and storage, with involvement in fora such as the Agricultural Information Management Standards (AIMS) community of UN FAO and the Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research for Development (CIARD). AK is supporting the open data and models movement, participating and contributing in initiatives such as the Research Data Alliance and its dedicated Agricultural Data Interoperability Interest Group, the World Bank’s Global Food Safety Partnership where it co-chairs the Knowledge & Learning Systems Working Group and leads the Database Subgroup, as well as the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition initiative (GODAN).

Through a strategic partnership with the Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and the ARIADNE Foundation, Agroknow is hosting the Data Processing Unit of the traditional AGRIS service – a global information system collecting and making accessible bibliography on agricultural science and technology.

Since 2008, Agroknow has been directly involved in more than twenty (20) EU-funded projects related to the management of agricultural information, in the context of which it has worked on solving data interoperability problems and developing data products. These include (but are not limited to) Big Data Europe, FREME, agINFRA, SemaGrow and Organic.Lingua.

In this context, Agroknow has collaborated with European leaders in agricultural research such as the Wageningen UR (Netherlands), the French Institute of Agricultural Research (INRA), the International Center for Research in Organic Food Systems (ICROFS, Denmark), and the Council for Agricultural Research (CRA, Italy). Agroknow has also received consultancy and implementation contracts from organisations such as the University of Alcala (Spain), Michigan State University (USA), the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR), the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA, Jordan) and the Open Data Institute (UK).

Last but not least AK group is composed of people with agricultural, computer and information science background. This mix of people is very important to solve challenging data problems such as the one addressed by the OpenMinTeD project.

Contact

Nikos Manouselis nikosm@agroknow.com