At the recent ICTforAg Conference, the “What Works for Ag Data: Apps, Tools, and Visualizations” session brought together three digital development professionals to discuss data analysis and presentation tools:
- Matthew Cooper of Conservation International
- Tilly Josephson of Vera Solutions
- Michael Shoag of Forum One
Existing Data Sets
One of the more interesting aspects of their session were a number of existing agriculture data sets that Michael Shoag that organizations could use to start their data analysis, or enhance the data organizations already have:
- World Bank Datasets: Free and open macro-level data about countries around the globe, which can serve as a baseline for analysis.
- FAO STAT: A plethora of regularly updated global food and agriculture data, including production, trade, prices, food security, emissions, forestry, etc.
- Green Growth Knowledge Platform: Allows for comparison of a variety of data in green growth, including country, indicators and sectors.
- USDA Foreign Agriculture Service: The best data for international trade and agriculture data, though the website itself has a very dated look.
- GAIN, or Global Agriculture Information Network: Detailed reports on agricultural markets and opportunities, though not very visual
- Global Agriculture Trade System (GATS): Includes international agricultural, fish, forest and textile products trade statistics dating from 1989 to present.
- Food Security Portal: Provides comprehensive and detailed information on crop production and price volatility for 20 countries.
- Harvest Choice Mappr: Showcases over 300 layers of spatially-explicit, agricultural-related data for sub-Saharan Africa
- Resilience Atlas: Integrates 60 of the best available datasets related to resilience into custom maps.
Creating Your Own Dataset
Tilly Josephson highlighted several important factors to consider before determining what data analysis product is right for your organization:
- Is it user-friendly for non-technical staff?
- Is it vendor independent? Can you tweak it yourself if the form changes?
- Can it scale along with your needs?
- Is it proven to work in the development context?
- What are the ongoing support options? Is in-person training available?
- What is the cost?
Matthew Cooper spoke about how his organization created two public datasets, Vital Signs and the Resilience Atlas, using Open Data Kit (ODK), a free and open-source set of tools which help organizations author, field, and manage mobile data collection solutions (particularly surveys).
ODK can be combined with services like ONA to host survey templates, visualized data, and allow data to be download via CSV files. Another option is CartoDB, which can create interactive maps using JavaScript and PostGIS. An alternative to CartoDB is ArcGIS.
Cloud services such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud can help your organization host its data on the cloud instead of managing your own servers. Matthew noted that if cost is a concern for your organization, Amazon is starting to offer discounts for NGOs.
Kristen Grennan is an emerging digital development professional and ICT4DJobs consultant.
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