Slides of talk at the Workshop on e-Infrastructures supporting Food Safety Risk Assessment, hosted by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), Parma, May 13th, 2015.

1. Reflections on making EFSA an
open science organisation
Nikos Manouselis, CEO Agro-Know
nikosm@agroknow.gr

2. background

3. An extraordinary company that captures, organizes
and adds value to the rich information available in
agricultural and biodiversity sciences, in order to
make it universally accessible, useful and meaningful.
http://www.agroknow.gr

4. Unorganized Content in
local and remote sites
Widgets
Authoring services
Data Discovery Services
Analytics services
Data Platform
Ingestion Translation Publication
Harvesting BlossomCultivation
Organized and structured
Content in local and remote
DBs
Educational
Bibliographic
Other
Enrichment
Aggregate
data from
diverse
sources
Works with
different type
of data
Prepare data
for
meaningful
services
Educational
Bibliographic
data aggregation & sharing solutions

5. indicative partners & clients
• Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
• Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR)
• International Fund for Agricultural Development
(IFAD)
• World Bank Group
• UK’s Dept for International Development (DFID)
• Michigan State University (MSU)
• Wageningen University & Research (WUR)
• French Institute of Agricultural Research (INRA)
• International Centre for Research in Organic Food
Systems (ICROFS)

6. advocates of open
• CIARD.net: a global movement dedicated to
open agricultural knowledge
• Global Open Data for Agriculture and
Nutrition (GODAN): make agricultural and
nutritionally relevant data available,
accessible, and usable for unrestricted use
worldwide

7. making different systems work together
• Agricultural Interoperability Interest Group
(IG), Research Data Alliance (RDA)
• Knowledge & Learning Systems WG, Global
Food Safety Partnership (GFSP)

8. large scale data-related projects
• agINFRA: a data infrastructure to support agricultural scientific
communities (2011 - 2015)
– 12 partners (incl. FAO); tech coordinator, evaluation, sustainability
– in G8 Open Data in Agriculture Action Plan for Europe
• SemaGrow: Data intensive techniques to boost the real-time
performance of global agricultural data infrastructures (2012 - 2015)
– 8 partners (incl. FAO, WUR); tech, evaluation, sustainability
– in G8 Open Data in Agriculture Action Plan for Europe
• OpenMinTeD: Open Mining INfrastructure for TExt and Data (2015-
2018)
– 15 partners (incl. UoA, EBI, INRA); tech+data, requirements & evaluation
• Big Data Europe: Integrating Big Data, Software and Communities for
Addressing Europe’s Societal Challenges (2015-2018)
– 12 partners (incl. FAO); agri-food community & use cases

9. (my) understanding of the context
• vision: “Society engages in EFSA’s scientific
work and gains trust in the EU food safety
system”
–increase openness & transparency
–openness to meaningful contributions

10. levels of reflection
a) on a data e-infrastructure for EFSA
operations
b) on positioning EFSA within a food
safety data ecosystem
c) on “data need”-oriented innovation
services for EFSA stakeholders

11. a data e-infrastructure for EFSA
operations

12. example: agINFRA.eu

13. open & federated architecture
agINFRA automated metadata aggregation workflows
Publications
CIARD RING registry
Federated information providers
Data sets
CIARD RING registry
Educational
CIARD RING registry
…etc

14. catalogue of data sources/sets

15. published & linked vocabularies

16. complex, automated data ingestion
Metadata
harvester
Filtering
component
Stores
File system
(DC, IEEE
LOM, MODS
XML)
File system
(DC, IEEE
LOM, MODS
XML)
Stores
Identification and
de-duplication
component
MySQL
Dupli
cates
Stores
Transformation
component
( to AKIF)
Store
metadata in
JSON (Internal
Format)
Link checking
component
PostProcessing/
Enrichment
component
File
system
(XMLs)
Get unique ID
Records
with
Broken
Links
Indexing mechanism
API

17. big data technologies

18. data customer service

19. how could this look like for EFSA?
EFSA’s data & information hub
Toxicity testing
methods
Registry
Various data providers, of various scientific data sources/formats
Pesticide outputs
Registry
Foodborne disease
outbreaks
Registry
…etc

20. positioning EFSA within a food
safety data ecosystem

21. example: AGRIS (http://agris.fao.org)

23. the AGRIS ecosystem looks simple…

24. …but it is a bit more complex

25. How does the EFSA data ecosystem look like?

26. need-oriented innovation
services for EFSA stakeholders

27. example: CSPI
• the organized voice of the American public on
nutrition, food safety, health and other issues
– “improve food safety laws and reduce the incidence of
foodborne illness”
• has tracked foodborne illness outbreaks since 1997
– events where two or more people become ill from
eating the same food
– outbreaks where both the food and pathogen can be
identified

28. US Outbreak Alert Database (until 2011)
http://cspinet.org/foodsafety/outbreak/pathogen.php

29. US Outbreak Report (after 2011)
http://cspinet.org/foodsafety/outbreak_report.html

30. stakeholder with very specific challenges
a) time-consuming & laborious primary data
identification and documentation (by hand)
b) not complete coverage: incomplete &
problematic data collection and sharing
c) multiple & outdated databases for
secondary/processed data storage and
curation
d) time-consuming & expensive processed
data visualization & publication

31. advanced data organisation & classification

32. auto extract structured data from text

33. include & link to food recall data

34. add more (relevant) data sources

35. allow users to customize data reports

36. provide multi-channel access to data

37. Challenges of EFSA stakeholders?
• each decision maker has own data needs
–Which information is critical for their work?
–What is the main challenge in finding, managing
or disseminating this information?

38. and what’s next?

39. Separate Independent (variably
linked) actions
Collective and Cohesive Approach
(More Collaboration, Coordination,
Communication, Connection)
harmonising & linking scientific outputs?

40. EFSA’s Data &
Information Hub
Context-specific Data &
Information Hubs
Source diagram from Open Models concept paper: http://bit.ly/1p729Jm
can openness be addictive?

41. thank you!
nikosm@agroknow.gr
www.agroknow.gr