Ramón Alcarria, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM). UPM participate in two of the DEMETER pilots and also collaborate in the establishment of the multi-actor approach framework and monitoring activities for Open Call newcomers.
Open Call challenges and winners:
The first DEMETER Open Call, called DEVELOP, attracted and engaged SMEs with technology products that can be implemented within the Agro-business. A total of 10 companies have been beneficiaries of the open call, to solve the following challenges:
1- Soil workability and humidity monitoring: focused on increasing the precision of soil humidity. WAISENSE FIELDS, W4A-SoilWorkability, SoilSignal and Soily projects work on this topic.
2- Interoperable Geo Tagged Photo APP: to demonstrate DEMETER interoperability enabler for Farm Management Information Systems. CAP/P project address this topic.
3- ISOBUS enabler: Developing an interoperability Gateway software component enable interoperability between different agriculture hardware, tools, and systems without any deep knowledge about the ISOBUS protocol. ELLIOT-ISOBUS proposal has been selected for this challenge.
4- Blockchain-based solutions for agricultural applications: to enable traceability and interoperability with DEMETER components as an agri-food vertical solution. The PerSePHOne project works on this aspect.
5- DEMETER Business process integration (BPM): to enable the efficient sharing of data between business processes, planning each step of production process, optimal usage of all resources, defining work orders, defining products shipping plan, setting a marketing budget etc. The DEBBIE, CollectGood and OPTIFLAXIT projects are responsible for contributing to this challenge.
Strengthening the bond between pilots and DEMETER architecture
One of the key points for the success of all the initiatives is good communication between the different actors in DEMETER ecosystem (domain experts, pilots, technical managers, and Open Call newcomers). To assure this, a monitoring structure has been designed in relation to follow-up, supervision, and facilitation of resources for open call projects, considering that the above-mentioned actors will be the facilitators of synergies in DEMETER:
The topic proposers, who have proposed the five challenges mentioned above, provide their vision to monitor the alignment and synergies of the OC1 projects with the DEMETER pilots currently in development. In that sense, pilots may work as testbeds or have relevant data sets for the OC1 technologies. What’s more, the OC1 technologies can be useful for some pilots such as blockchain technology or ISOBUS interoperability, to give two examples.
Each OC#1 project has an associated coach, who is a DEMETER partner whose role is to support, guide, provide feedback, motivate, understand, and challenge the SME team. The mission of the coach in this line is to explore collaboration opportunities between OC1 projects and monitor the development of the projects.
The DEMETER architectural experts play a very relevant role in these coming months. These provide OC1 teams access to the DEMETER platform and guide the integration of their technologies, through detailed documentation, demos, and support systems such as issue trackers. This ensures the use of DEMETER components and data models, and their improvement by enhancing their interoperability with other external systems.
Finally, the project evaluators conduct an assessment of deliverables submitted by the SMEs and provide their feedback, recommending improvement actions. The state of integration and deployment of the OC1 projects, as well as the level of achievement of the proposed objectives, will be crucial to be able to establish comparative measures in the evolution of these projects.
Thanks to this support structure for the Open Call newcomers, we will ensure a constant flow of information, for a correct development of the projects and their contribution to DEMETER goals.
