Agricultural Data Hub Implementation

Creating seamless access to data and information along the agricultural value chain promises a radical change in transforming agriculture and food systems around the world, towards eliminating hunger and poverty, creating truly sustainable climate smart systems and meeting the 2030 Sustainable Development. It is in the light of this that the Ghana Agricultural Data Hub (Ag-Data Hub) is being developed as a secure mission-critical, reliable, multi-tier and multipurpose digital data exchange backbone for information and data sharing among stakeholders and for the development of fact-based decision support systems to drive policy-making and to trigger a move towards sustainable climate smart agricultural practices.

The specific objectives for the Ag-Data Hub are:

1. To implement a support infrastructure for traditional data migration into Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) data formats.
2. To engineer a seamless data flow architecture and analytical tools for fast retrieval, analysis and providing complex insight into big data.
3. To implement APIs for data gaps bridging, information sharing among stakeholders and to serve the software developer community under defined contracts and MOUs.
4. To facilitate the development of Application layer decision support systems and dashboards based on information needs of various stakeholders in the value chain

The principal objective of the Ghana Ag-Data Hub is to build a robust mission critical reliable digital data exchange backbone for information and data sharing among relevant stakeholders as a support infrastructure for fact-based decision making among players in the Agricultural value chain, policy makers, and many others towards a peruse for a more sustainable and climate smart agriculture. The Ag-Data Hub should be seen as a piping backbone of privately or publicly managed distributed networks of data and information systems containing the following components:

Traditional Data Migration Support Infrastructure: A compendium of flexible and easy to use free tool for data collection through field visits, interviews and questionnaires or for migration of traditional unstructured data into structured Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) and machine-readable formats. Collected data is stored in isolated databases solely managed and owned by the institution(s) collecting or migrating their data. Data is owned by the source institution and can be provided to others only at their request and with owner’s approval governed by defined sharing rules by the owner. Collection or migration and presentation of information will be directly done by the owner or through an intermediary (eg. consultant) on a delegated authority by the owner. Easy to use digital forms and tools within this support infrastructure will work online and offline on computers or via APPs on mobile devices with a target of supporting traditional record keeping institution to begin their transition to digitization.

Data/Information Lookup Directory: Users can use the lookup directory to find out whether the Ag-Data Hub has access to resources on a particular subject matter. The lookup directory will serve as a catalogue containing the following information about each dataset or information product. A base template will be designed and shared for all stakeholders submit a catalogue of datasets and tools and modalities of access.

ETL Engine & Pipeline Infrastructure with secure APIs for data exchange: This engine will be built to further process and exchange datasets in computer readable formats such as CSV, JSON, XML as well as GET-request options between partner institutions under agreed MOUs or as open data depending on established data/information sharing rules governing the data or information. The APIs will be developed by the implementation team of the Ag-Data Hub where need be in collaboration with technical staff of data owners to ensure data access breaches are not infringed on.

NB: Data will sit at the source institution and will be provided to others only through APIs with owner’s approval governed by defined sharing rules determined by the

Reporting and Decision Support Dashboards and tools: This will see to the development of cross-cutting cluster of dashboards and analytic tools to provide high quality data support to researchers, policy makes, extension and other actors in the value chain. Main focus areas will see to providing of a wide range of simple easy-to-use to advanced data analytical solutions to all agricultural and climate change stakeholders in Ghana. The implementation of this platforms will bring together a group of statisticians, scientists, data engineers and expert programmers working together to ensure a patterns, trends and correlations that might go undetected in text-based data can be exposed and recognized easier with data visualization. The Reporting and Decision Support Dashboards and its tools will provide a suit of tools that allows customization of visualizations using data sourced from multiple stakeholders.