Mapping of projects within ICT and robotics for agriculture

Why map projects?

Digitalisation, big data, internet of things, smart farming, future internet, are expressions used in an increasing recognition of the necessity of ICT and automation for a sustainable agriculture. This has already lead to substantial investments in R&D for ICT and automation in agriculture in European as well as national funding programs.

It seems very likely that EU as well as national and regional investments in projects within ICT and automation for a sustainable agriculture will lead to several projects with similar objectives. It is therefore also very likely that there are potential synergies and mutual benefits to be achieved by collaboration. As for example, wider applicability of smart applications, better compliance to standards, lower development costs, and a larger market for ICT products.

ICT-AGRI collected data about ongoing projects within ICT and automation for a sustainable agriculture. The results of the analysis of these data is published at the SRAI of ICT-AGRI.

Only public information

The information about the the mapped projects is retrieved from public websites and includes therefore only information which is published already. Email adresses are not shown. Contact to projects is enabled by a form which sends a mail to the project contact person, who then can decide to reply or ignore.  

How to use the mapped projects

The mapped projects can be listed by funders and by country of the funders.

There are two search methods:

  • A simple search by one or more keywords. Words in title or summary must match a keyword exactly.
  • An advanced search with search profiles, which can contain several weighted keywords. Here keywords need only match a part of words in title or summary. Hits are sorted and limited by a score calculated as the sum of matching keywords. A search can be limited by minimum project end year and by minimum total budget.

Website users can bookmark projects by a collection tool. This is an easy way to store interesting projects for later use.

Web site users can contact projects by a form which sends a mail to the project contact person, who then can decide to reply or ignore. 

Preparing for Open Access mapping

Mapping of projects is a usual exercise for most EU funded ERA-NETs. Mappings have been performed in various ways, they have always been quite labour consuming and the impacts often questionable. This mapping will be done maually by the ICT-AGRI-FOOD partners and volunteers, and therefore also laborous. 

In the future mapping of projects should be done by automatic harvesting of metadata from the funding agencies' databases. Such schemes are already in operation for mainly research results from  anumber of universities and research organisations, who have adopted Open Access standards. The EU operated website OpenAIRE, for example, can be searched for a great number of publications and also for EU funded projects.

This mapping of projects will be done in a way that simulates Open Access harvesting of metadata from funding agencies. ICT-AGRI-FOOD will, in parallel with the manual collection of project metadata, work on an intelligent analysis of the mapping data as well as tools for harvesting metadata from funding agencies.