Metadata Management and Asset Exchange in the Agricultural Data Ecosystem of the Project Agri-Gaia

The particularities of the agricultural ecosystem of cooperating partners suggest a highly distributed, open data architecture to support the exchange and re-use of data and data-driven applications. We describe the data strategy and the federated basic architecture of the Agri-Gaia ecosystem. We present an ontology-based approach to metadata management which extends a bucket store for arbitrary data storage by an RDF-based metadata graph store and employs widely-used domain ontologies as a conceptual basis. Data and service providers are free to extend the describing metadata at any time, according to their needs. The resulting set of interconnected platforms supports the publication, retrieval and secure sharing of exposable data under full control of their owners.