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