ISSUE #3 
July 2021
Interoperability and the future of digital agricultural services
Agriculture plays an important role in providing food security, food safety and sustainability for the global population. At the same time, the growing population and food demand, as well as the climate change coupled with growing environmental and regulatory pressures, are placing important challenges and limitations on the farmers and the AgriFood sector. With most of the agricultural land already being utilised, it becomes more and more important to upscale, upgrade, and modify the agricultural sector by delivering the right tools to the agri-stakeholders to mitigate the climate change impacts and successfully feed the world.
If agriculture is to continue to feed the world, it needs to Digi-transform.
Technology innovations, as well as the wider availability and adoption of digital agriculture services over the last decades, have contributed to the simplification and easing of fieldwork and have led to higher productivity levels, delivering significant benefits to the sector. Although the introduction and adoption of digital technologies assisted in addressing the rising demand for food, there is still a need for more efficient and optimised food production processes, including reducing crop losses and food wastage at all stages of the AgriFood value chain.
Connectivity and interoperability are essential for sustainable farming.
Currently, an extensive number of digital solutions including products and services are available to be utilized by the AgriFood sector, leveraging on top of artificial intelligence-based techniques and big data analytics. These solutions can support producers and the industry to address the challenges of agricultural production both in terms of productivity and sustainability and mitigate climate impact. Emerging new applications extending on top of IoT, UAV, UGV, robotics, RoS, cloud and edge computing will transform agriculture further from the traditional farm practices towards a highly automated and data intensive industry.
Digital Agri-solutions are transforming European agriculture, by allowing many more sources of data to be brought together for interpretation and timely actions.
This plethora of digital solutions, services, hardware and data, requires a framework that will support their seamless integration and infrastructure that will enable their full exploitation and capitalization. All solutions, resources and data can be available and reachable on a single case basis. Nonetheless collecting, grouping, homogenizing and processing massive amounts of digital data with a high spatial and temporal resolution, coming from different data resources has been a complex and sometimes impossible case. This is mainly because the majority are proprietary solutions or utilize proprietary standards which inhibit interoperability and portability of applications when taking services from vendors, or because of nonuniformity between the solutions or data format.
ATLAS is filling this gap by delivering the infrastructure and framework that enables interoperability of services, solutions, sensors and machinery. At the same time, it offers the ability to streamline data collection, analysis and services enhancing information and activity capabilities when it comes to crop management, animal behavior and food production.
In simple terms, ATLAS enables every agri-stakeholder (i.e., a farmer, a consultant, an agrifood industry, a researcher, a services provider etc.) to exploit and utilize any ATLAS connected service or machinery and any data captured through it. ATLAS makes this possible in a simple and hassle-free way through their devices (smartphone, pc, onboard processor etc.) without the need for technical knowledge or any additional third-party applications or intermediaries. Services, applications and hardware coming from different vendors, when made available in the ATLAS ecosystem, can now interconnect under ATLAS in a plug and play way.
