Aquaculture Smart and Open Data Analytics as a Service

Project Information

AquaSmart

Grant agreement ID: 644715

DOI

10.3030/644715

Project closed

EC signature date 12 December 2014

Start date 2 February 2015

End date 1 February 2017

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 3 109 077,50

EU contribution

€ 2 717 432,37

Coordinated by

SOUTH EAST TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY
Ireland

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - AquaSmart (Aquaculture Smart and Open Data Analytics as a Service)

Reporting period: 2016-02-02 to 2017-02-01

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The overall objective of aquaSmart is to enhance the innovation capacity within the aquaculture sector by investigating the problem of global knowledge access and data exchange between aquaculture companies and their related stakeholders. By offering aquaculture production companies the tools to access and share global open data, as well as the ability to carry out strong data analytics in a multilingual, multi-sector and cross-border setting we provide the mechanism to strengthen their competitiveness and growth potential. We brought together experienced research institutes to participate in the consortium as technology suppliers who will work on this solution, and transfer their solution to the aquaculture stakeholders. Our aquaSmart multi-lingual adaptive eTraining program, ensures that staff receive the proper training and assures the transfer of the aquaSmart innovations are sustainable.

The aquaSmart solution will have a very positive impact on the environment by helping companies to better estimate daily biomass, optimize feeding rates and management practices. This improves the FCR (Feed Conversion Rate), which means less feed will be provided to the fish and therefore, less organic material and energy are consumed to produce the feed. aquaSmart helps the companies to reduce mortalities, which will have a further positive impact on environment. On the social level, aquaSmart contributes to the development of highly skilled workforce through online training programs. The improvement of the efficiency and profitability of the businesses, together with the reduction of the environmental impact will contribute to the increase of the production and the generation of new jobs in the sector.

The key Objectives of AQUASMART, as outlined below are ambitious, challenging and will seek to bring cutting edge technology closer to the market for use by fish farmers.

- Technology transfers in multilingual data collection, analytics solutions and services, turning the large volumes of heterogeneous aquaculture data into semantically interoperable data assets and knowledge, that is distributed across the value chain
- Implement a State of Art Multilingual Open Data framework that companies can use to seamlessly access global data
- Promote best practices for aquaculture production management
- Develop innovation in the aquaculture sector tackling the new opportunities to access to the global data, integrated from many heterogeneous sources of data described in different data models and languages.
- Develop a training programme and training activities
- Deliver draft CEN standard on “Reference Model for Open Data in Aquaculture”, including a glossary, lexicon and reference ontology for the aquaculture sector
- Engage with a cross-sectorial, multi-lingual user community around EU open data, suggesting aquaculture open datasets, and sharing the AQUASMART applications and services

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Year 1 of the project focussed on gathering requirements, building Use Cases and defining the initial technical design and architecture design, the management team was formed and the appropriate procedures for the effective management of the project were set in place. The project website was established as well as Facebook and Twitter accounts to provide public information on news items related to the project.

In the second period, we continued to build and enhance on the technical and training achievements of the first period, ensuring that our efforts were always aligned with the needs of the real end users, while also turning our efforts towards standards bodies and market exploitation of our solution. We identified key business requirements and KPIs as well as the specification of the architecture to support the requirements. This included the development of an Aquasmart ontology to support semantically rich data and the development of a cloud based platform with APIs for native application support. The Training Policy, training programmes and training material were identified and material developed. To support this the Moodle platform was installed with plug-ins to be properly used by mobile devices. The trials were set up and through working with the end users we identified the main business questions, gathered the data and identified how the data could be best served to address the business questions.

Based on discussions with the WP6 Leader (Impact) and meetings with our external expert’s panel and our partners, the vision and objectives for dissemination were defined and adhered to. Our goal was to release a product to the market, and this was achieved through the development and release of the aquaSmart cloud-based solution to the market at the end of the project. This involved software development work as well as a Sales & Marketing plan to fully exploit the opportunities. Within the terms of standardisation activities, the consortium has been quite active, engaging with European Standards Body CEN/CENELEC, International Standard Organisation and the National Standards Authority of Ireland, and has delivered a CEN standards drafting protocol supported by a CEN Workshop project to continue these activities of BigData standardisation within aquaculture beyond the lifetime of the project.

All the above tasks have been carried out in accordance with the fact that the project has a multi-lingual end user base, but also with the key point in mind that this venture will be set down for not just the project partners, but with the wider European audience in mind, thus serving the needs of the European Union at large.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

aquaSmart defined and delivered a framework that offers state of the art technology in multi-lingual open data for aquaculture stakeholders. This framework provides business opportunities that enable aquaculture companies to seamlessly share common semantic interoperable data from their operations dataset and to create a data supply chain for the benefit of the participating end users, independent of language.

aquaSmart delivers:
1) A Cloud platform that allows Users to upload, analyse and benchmark their data against similar aquaculture industrialists
2) A Training platform that provides the policies and materials to allow both new and existing users in the industry to be trained up in the nuances of the industry, but also in how data analysis, and aquaSmart can assist in the industry.
3) Input into the standards process through a Cen Workshop Agreement for use of Big Data in the aquaculture industry, and the creation of a standards working group to continue this work beyond the life of the project.

AQUASMART delivered on expected impact through our unified and evolutionary approach to communication, dissemination and exploitation. A phased approach was adopted, having 2 primary foci, (i) a web-based portal with social media and (ii) an internal technology readiness roadmap view, charting the technology progress of the project. The web-based portal provides the backbone for supporting impact activities throughout the project and is the primary port of call for external communications to and from the project with the social media tools. To support this project web portal, we launched a market specific commercial website to focus on providing a service to the industry and bring customers to the platform from a market specific perspective.

AquaSmart Concept