11 e-Infrastructures for Agriculture in China: State of the Art and Requirements Meng Xianxue Qian Ping Wang Jian Agricultural Information Institute of Chinese Academy Agricultural Sciences September 28, 2012

22 Outlines Brief introduction State of the Art Comments and Requirements

33 Brief Introduction Agriculture communities in China Agriculture developments in China

44 Involving many stakeholders, including: Agricultural research organizations (academies, institutes, universities, and so on ) Agricultural extension agencies Agricultural production (enterprises farms and individual farmers) Agricultural management units Agricultural products processing, selling and logistics companies Agricultural community in China

55 Total production of agricultural products continue to increase over the years; The literacy of rural population continue to improve; ICT application for agriculture and rural life has been accepted as a national strategy; Agriculture still faces pressures resulting from farming land, water, natural disasters. Agriculture development in China

6 State of the Art E-infrastructure development--general E-infrastructure development--examples

77 E-infrastructure development--general Mostly started in the 1990s and afterwards Internet and mobile internet developed quickly (China telecom, China Unicom, China Mobile, CSTNET, and so on) and Infrastructure of telecom has covered almost all rural areas in China. The number of Web users in rural areas was 136 millions in 2011, 71.3% of them using mobile phones to access Internet.

88 E-infrastructure development--general Almost all have gone online (recent survey on nearly 800 research organizations) There are more than 30,000 active agricultural websites in China, meanwhile, hundreds of integrated information service platforms have merged till now. More huge and comprehensive data centers (i.e. NADC) have been put in use to support agri-research and agr-business.

99 E-infrastructure development--general More innovative technologies, such as internet of things and wireless sensors, linked data and open access, etc. have been applied in e-infrastructure for agriculture to form an information flow including data acquisition, transfer, organization, sharing and analysis.

10 Main workflow: Data acquisition Information Transfer based on network Information organization Data analysis and Save Data sharing and accessing platform E-infrastructure development-examples

11 Data Acquisition- crop farming working area Field server connection Field server

12 Environment information Growth information Weather information Water-Fertilizer information Video&Image of Environment Video&Image of Pest and disease Data from remote monitor and sensor Photosynthesis model Diagnose of pest & disease Model of growth vigor Model of soil-water-fertilizer Digital Orchard

13 Data Acquisition- animal husbandry

14 Information Transfer based on Mesh WLAN in the field

15 Guangdong Yangjiang AG Base

16 Information organization Agricultural Ontology Agri. S&T documents, East sea fish, agri-production and market info and so on.

17 Internet of Agricultural Thing

18 Data analysis tools and storage facilities are evolving. Data analysis tools: –Mathematics models –Statistics models Data Storage: –Distributed large-scale storage devices –Data backup devices Data analysis and Save

19 Powerful agricultural semantic search engine Agricultural ontology concept sharing workbench AgriViVO platform to facilitate better collaboration between agricultural research actors and ensure more effective management of research projects and more rational funding. Data sharing and accessing platform

20 Web data pool Cloud data 1 Cloud data n …… Cloud security control Application 1 Application 2 Dem GIS User interface Application n ： …… Data mining Statistical models Linked open data Application Example

21 AgriVIVO VIVO is a research-focused discovery tool that enables collaboration among scientists across all disciplines at Cornell University. It allows to browse information on people, departments, courses, grants, and publications following an ontology-based navigation. AgriVIVO integrates data from several large agricultural research management communities into a VIVO RDF store, customizing the ontology model to the organization of agricultural research, focusing on the relationships between people, institutions, projects, topics, events, and geographic locations.

22 National Agricultural Digital Library

23 National Agricultural Digital Library

24 National Agricultural Digital Library

25 National Agricultural Digital Library

26 National Agricultural Data Center Sharing Platform for R&D Facilities and Large Scientific Instruments Infrastructure of National Natural Sci & Tech Conditions The Public Service Platform for Technology Application Platform for Network Circumstance of Science & Technology Platform for Sci &Tech literature sharing Platform for Scientific Data Sharing 1. National agricultural Data Center, NADC 2. National Climate Data Center … 23. National Forestry Scientific Data Center National Sci & tech Platform of infrastructure

27 Authorized by the ministry of science and technology of RPC Basement Database of Agricutlrual Sci-tech The construction of NADC Upgrading to be authorized as National Sci-tech Basement platform Agricultural Database for tech-promotion

28 NADC Integrating over 2TB data within 736 datasets, 62 databases; all in 12 categories Operating on a platform consisting of 1 main website, 7 member- websites, over 25 data- nodes, and 15 province- level data-centers Supporting over 150 big scientific and technical organizations and companies, over 800 individuals, and millions of anonymous users. Surpporting 15 millions accessing from 1.6 millions IPs a day

29 There are totally 42 domain servers, 78 database servers and 64 web servers in the network of NADC … … … The main website of NADC 7 Sub-centers of NADC 19 province-level data centers of NADC 25 data nodes of NADC

30 Sub data centers Sub data center Main data center Sub data center Main data center Main data center The relationship among main website and federal websites

31 Over 2TB data falls in 12 categories of agriculture domain and is organized in 62 subject databases and 736 datasets.

32 SDD Agri-websites People interested in Agri-information a portal that aggregates, organizes, and publishes agri-information A web search engine specified on agricultural information.

33 SDD The information SDD collects and provides

34 Agricultural websites 32,258 Year SDD 8,179,050 Data Amount Year

35 The regions of users The performance of SDD Very fast (641MS/per accessing 91Mark of 100 by Alexa) 26,000 registered users; 30,000 regular users; 1000 new users per month averagely Farmers Businessmen Developers Researchers Government employees … SDD

36 Agri-websites in China

37 Agri-websites in China SponsorInformation ProvidedRank Government of different levels All aspects of agriculture, mainly in policy, sometimes providing early-warning about weather, flood, and pest. 1 Scientific and educational organizations Mainly the information for farmers training and educating. 2 Online news agenciesNews about agriculture, rural areas, farmers, etc. 3 Agri-businessMainly the advertising of goods and services relating to agriculture. 4 Others5

38 Large-scale applications Several provinces have initiated large- scale applications of ICT for agriculture and rural community, along with e- infrastructure improvements and using all available networks including the Internet, mobile, telephone as well as television networks, to bring into farm households information and knowledge adapted to local needs.

39 Comments Comments and Requirements Telecom Telecom-level infrastructure (>90%) Web tools (beginning) Web resources (growing continuously) Web resources (growing continuously) Data infrastructure (quick developing) Computing network (beginning) Application Physical infrastructure Fundamental infrastructure for applicants Application

40 Comments (I) Rapid growth of telecom-level infrastructure for agriculture; Booming of agricultural web resources, as well as web users; Professional data sharing platforms continuously increase to play major roles in e- infrastructure for agriculture. Comments and Requirements

41 Comments (II) At application level, an open technical framework of agri-data/information flow covering data acquisition to analysis is now in the course of development; Also, some new initiatives such as ‘big data’ have shown their vitality and received more and more attention. Comments and Requirements

42 Comments (III) More and more virtualized technologies (i.e. Grid, Cloud computing, etc.) and sensor-based technologies (i.e. internet of things) will be applied as parts of e- infrastructure for agriculture. Comments and Requirements

43 Requirements (I) Stronger ability of network transmission, esp. among different organizations; Standards and specifications for web resource sharing, and, now, for universal computing over different networks. Comments and Requirements

44 Requirements (II) More tools to collect, organize, transfer, process, and analyze web information in order to create a more structured web resource. More researches and technologies (i.e. virtualized technologies) that can help to overcome the hetero-structure full of Internet should be paid more attention. Comments and Requirements

45 Requirements (III) More researches and practices on huge and comprehensive data centers, as well as computing centers. Paying more attention to new technologies such as big data and sensor-based technologies to upgrade current infrastructure. Comments and Requirements

46 Requirements (III) Stronger cooperation on large-scale scientific projects, such as climate change, to bring more researchers working together, which can be the engine for a better e-infrastructure for agriculture. Comments and Requirements

47 Thank you for your attention!