Press Release: Week of Big and open data and Digital Innovation Hubs

On January 31 – February 2, 2023, the “Week of Big and Open Data and Digital Innovation Hubs” took place in the center of Prague. In addition to the Plan4all association, other organizations were also involved in the organization of this intensive three-day event, namely the Czech Technological Platform for Agriculture, the CzechInno association, the WirelessInfo company, the Czech Center for Science and Society, Lesprojekt – services and Help Service – Remote Sensing. The event took place as a personal meeting of developers, managers, researchers, specialists, representatives of the state administration, private organizations, agricultural enterprises as well as end users.

The first day, January 31, 2023, was opened by a traditional conference, during which the results of the international projects STARGATE, SIEUSOIL, SmartAgriHubs, AgriHub CZ&SK and DEMETER were presented and unique solutions created over the past few years. The newly started projects PrepSoil, Data4Food2030, THEROS, DALIA, SAGRE and trans4num were also presented.

Individual presentations can be downloaded under a specific lecture:

Atlas Životního prostředí Liberec – Irena Košková (Krajský úřad Libereckého kraje)

Horizon Europe and where we can continue to cooperate – search for common possibilities – Karel Charvát (Plan4all z.s., WirelessInfo) – free discussion

The following two days, February 1 and February 2, 2023, were dedicated to the format of so-called “workshops”, which were a combination of a workshop, training, hackathon and ideathlon with the aim of actively verifying the usability of existing technologies in practice, contributing to their improvement and looking for ways to successfully integrate these technologies. The training was accompanied by experienced mentors who personally worked with everyone to find optimal solutions according to specific requirements. Intensive negotiations with potential users took place during the workshops. There was a lot of interest especially from the agricultural community. The response from the users brought a number of insights and ideas for further technological development, outlined new possibilities for the commercialization of research results and confirmed the need to discuss research results with the user community.

Hub4Everybody is a unique, modifiable solution for publishing, sharing and cooperative management of geographic data. It can be professional data and measurements, but also outputs from research projects or student works, materials for teaching, sensory maps, visualizations of field surveys and other maps, tables or databases. In short, any spatial data in vector or raster form. You can easily upload your data to the hub environment, edit and set sharing parameters, or use web services created from your data. Hub4Everybody is an alternative combination of online office software and spatial data management system.

Map Whiteboard is a technology that allows multiple users to collaborate online on the same map project and share datasets. The technology shares the entire map and presents the data in the context of any background information that may be useful. It allows multiple clients to see the identical map interface and simultaneously draw on it, edit vector layers, which increases the very efficiency of work and collaboration, when you sit around the meeting table and look at the map together, comment on it, point to “things” and propose changes.

Climate Atlas

The climate atlas (https://www.agrihub.cz/hsl-ng/AgroClima) shows selected agroclimatic factors for longer periods of time. It is always possible to display an estimate of their uncertainty for individual factors. Agroclimatic factors display: frost-free period, water balance, total precipitation, amount of incident sunlight, last day suitable for nitrogen fertilizer application and a group of factors related to the growth of wheat (as a reference crop), namely temperatures suitable for its growth and, conversely, the amount of heat stress suppressing its growth.

SensLog

SensLog is a comprehensive sensor data management tool that spans the data pipeline from collection, storage, processing to publication and visualization. The basis of the system is a data model based on ISO 19156, which stores measured data as well as the results of partial analyses. Individual components ensure the reception and publication of data using the web services system in various formats and standards. At the same time, the SensLog system enables interoperability between different data providers and users, thanks to the set of SensLog Connectors it can receive and transmit data from different interfaces.

Artificial intelligence tools

Within the Lesprojekt cloud, the development and prototyping environment JupyterHub is available, in which, in addition to many other tools for programming in Python and R, the Keras and TensorFlow libraries designed for working with artificial neural networks are available.

Lesprojekt cloud and satellite data storage

One of the supporting applications on the Lesprojekt cloud is the Sentinel-2 satellite data repository, which every day brings new images available from the territory of the Czech Republic. It serves as a database for all other publication systems that work with satellite data. Thanks to the centralization of the data warehouse, we achieve significant savings in disk space and computing capacity. Derived products such as vegetation indices NDVI, EVI and others are calculated in one place and individual publication systems access them as part of internal services according to specified criteria (e.g. date, area, product type, cloud cover level, etc.).

FarmInsight

FarmInsight is a web application designed primarily for the preparation of application maps for a variable application. To easily work with farm data, the application supports several different ways of loading data on parts of land blocks for which calculations will be performed.

FieldCalc

FieldCalc is a web service for dividing fields (parts of LPIS land blocks) into zones based on values from one of the offered vegetation indices. EVI, NDVI, NDRE, NDTI, NDWI and RVI4S1 indices are currently supported. FieldCalc offers an API for integration into other tools and a web graphical user interface that allows you to display any LPIS block on the territory of the Czech Republic, choose one of the available satellite scenes, display the scene for the given territory in natural colors, perform the calculation and view the results. In addition to the web interface, there is also a plugin for QGIS.

Are you interested in the presentations from the conference or the technology from individual lessons and want to learn more? Contact us and we will connect you with people from the team who are in charge of the mentioned project or product development.

Karel Charvát, Plan4all, charvat@plan4all.eu
Šárka Horáková, WirelessInfo, horakova@wirelessinfo.cz
František Zadražil, Lesprojekt-služby, fzadrazil@gmail.com
Karel Charvát Jr., Lesprojekt-služby, charvat_junior@lesprojekt.cz