Initiated by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group, the Northeast Food Knowledge Ecosystem (NEFKE) is an ongoing cooperative effort supporting communication, coordination and collaboration among a broad range of agriculture and food systems stakeholders, researchers and supporters. We envision this evolving knowledge ecosystem fostering a “network of networks”, helping align and link private, public and civil society sector knowledge assets for collective impact, in support of shared goals for sustainable agriculture, healthy, equitable food systems and resilient communities in our region.
Farm Hack is a vital part of this knowledge ecosystem, providing critical R&D space supporting collaborative problem solving and open innovation. The NEFKE Open Shop has been created to share resources and ideas, and for presenting "problem statements" to the Farm Hack community.
A "Farm to Institution Open Data Standard" problem statement has been posted here.
Great to see some interest and enthusiasm around data standards! (usually a hard sell in my outreach work...)
Louis, NEFKE is in the very early stages of development, still (and hopefully always) very open to the participation and input of others like you. We're looking at the standards mentioned as a guide, but have a lot of work to do toward implementing them in a practical way.
The first thing we'll likely do is look at how we can better leverage and link existing organizational and network data via the Farm to Institution New England and NEFOOD web sites when we migrate them to Drupal. We'll likely extend the VIVO ontology for that, possibly using the Drupal-based ontology editor Neologism Valeria Pesce used for AgriVIVO. This will be supported and articulated through group value network mapping exercises that will enable us to identify the critical pathways and relationships between transactional food value chain players, and the wider support networks. I can see this something like this possibly happening at one of the upcoming Farm Hack gatherings, combining trained value network mapping facilitators with farmers, value chain intermediaries, support people (including info intermediaries like me) and programmers.
In terms of data sharing and staging, we'll be looking at ways Drupal can be used to shared linked data using tagging/metadata, e.g. via RDFa. I'm hoping we can secure additional funding to do that in a more expansive way at some point. I'm having lunch with the former President of the Data Commons Cooperative in a couple weeks to explore that particular model.