Palenque: a Big Data platform for data-driven agriculture

BENDERSKY DIEGO; E. FEUERSTEIN

Montpellier

Congreso; 2017 EFITA WCCA Congress (EFITA'2017); 2017

European Federation for Information Technology in Agriculture, Food and the Environment (EFITA)

Nowadays we have large amounts of information at our hands for the management of an agriculturebusiness. Yield monitors, weather and soil sensors and even satellite imagery (which is improving ona monthly basis both in resolution and frequency), generate amounts of data that were unimaginable afew years ago. This scenario represents the irruption of Big Data technologies, Data Science and otherrelated disciplines in the agriculture management business, the so-called data-driven agriculture(Zhang et al 2002) which can lead to a huge step forward in the productivity of many activities.Today, we can find several sources of data: public data from national, regional and local stateagencies, data collected by NGOs, cooperatives and local groups, and private data collected by farmowners with their own sensors and machinery. A typical characteristic of this data is that it is diverse,exposed in different sources, by different methods and in different formats (many of whichproprietary). Without the proper tools, this information is not easy to use, and most of the time it isdiscarded or sub-utilized.