G-8 open data conference builds food security alliances

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, along with Bill Gates and U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park, recently led a two-day international open data conference in Washington, saying that data “is among the most important commodities in agriculture” and sharing it openly increases its value. Vilsack, as head of the U.S. government delegation to the conference, announced the launch of a new 'virtual community' as part of a suite of actions, including the release of new data, that the U.S. is taking to give farmers and ranchers, scientists, policy makers and other members of the public easy access to publicly funded data to help increase food security and nutrition. 'The digital revolution fueled by open data is starting to do for the modern world of agriculture what the industrial revolution did for agricultural productivity over the past century,' Vilsack said. 'Open access to data will help combat food insecurity today while laying the groundwork for a sustainable agricultural system to feed a population that is projected to be more than 9 billion by 2050.' The virtual Food, Agriculture, and Rural data community launched on Data.gov—the U.S. government’s data sharing website—to catalogue America’s publicly available agricultural data and increase the ability of the public to find, download, and use datasets that are generated and held by the federal government. The data community features a collection of more than 300 newly cataloged datasets, databases, and raw data sources related to food, agriculture, and rural issues from agencies across the U.S. government. In addition to the data catalog, the virtual community shares a number of applications, maps and tools designed to help farmers, scientists and policymakers improve global food security and nutrition ... To assure further advancement of opening data globally, several countries have developed and announced plans of action to make agricultural data streams available to users in Africa and worldwide. The implementation of these action plans is an important step in spurring innovation in the agricultural sector and ultimately supporting a sustainable increase in food security and the promotion of adequate nutrition around the world.  Among those countries, the U.S. government released their action plan, highlighting a number of new and ongoing efforts including:  A partnership to support plant and microbial gene bank collections that curate, store and make genetic resources available via the Germplasm Resources Information Network or GRIN-Global;  U.S. leadership in the United Nations Global Strategy to Improve Agricultural and Rural Statistics, providing capacity building support for development and improvement of national agricultural and rural statistics; and  U.S. government efforts underway to develop national policies and implementation plans that ensure direct results of federally funded scientific research are made available and useful for the public, industry, and the scientific community which will effectively implement the White House memorandum titled 'Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research,' released earlier this year.  The action plan will also include announcements of new, publicly available datasets from the Millennial Challenge Corporation U.S. Agency for International Development, USDA and others. The private and nonprofit sectors will also announce the release of their own data sets at the conference.  The conference and the U.S. actions supporting open agricultural data fulfill the Open Data for Agriculture commitment made as part of the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, which was launched by President Barack Obama and G-8 partners at the 2012 G-8 Leaders Summit last year at Camp David, Md ..."