A new £3.19 million research project claims it can 'transform' the global accessibility of agricultural data.
The agINFRA project, led by a European Commission-backed consortium, sets out to connect agricultural researchers with a cutting-edge open access science infrastructure.
"agINFRA will make a real difference by connecting scientists across Europe to the highest quality information available across the globe," explained Miguel-Angel Sicilia, who heads the project for Spain's University of Alcala.
Since February, agINFRA has been conducting interviews with stakeholders from across Europe to brainstorm the best way to go about designing the system, and while technical details are still scarce, it has been confirmed that the process of "fine-tuning the finished infrastructure" is currently underway.
The £3.19 million project, which pledges to link EU researchers with agricultural research data from the likes of Asia and Latin America, excites Yves Jacques of the United Nations Food and Agriculture organisation.
He concluded: "agINFRA will provided a boost to multi-disciplinary research by lowering the barriers researchers face in finding and accessing data spread out across multiple global information systems."
