The Value of Historical Ag Data
Uh-oh here she goes again! I’ve been pondering the direction I wanted to take with this post – do I dig more into the data opportunities that may exist in the OAC Annual reports? or twist my Rubik’s cube to look at a different facet of this ongoing conversation. Let’s look at another facet.
You may recall that we created a tagline for Agri-food Data Canada (ADC) a few years ago:
Making agri-food data FAIR!
Remember Findable Accessible Interoperable Reusable. If you’ve been following this blog, you know we have gone into detail on FAIR and the tools that we have created to make the data FAIR. Now the question- which I have posed in the past also – do we need to qualify WHAT data we make FAIR? Does someone need to decide which data has more “value” and should be FAIR? Oh you know that question will not end well! So, let’s be objective and take that tagline at face value – agri-food data – whether it is created today or 150+ years ago. I know this may seem a little counter to what I said a few weeks ago – but I do feel that we need to think about the goal! Why would we want to make that 150+ data FAIR? What am I going to use that historical data for? If we can find it, dig it out, and document the older data – we also need to think about the resources that are needed to create that FAIR data resource AND do they outweigh how and if the data will be Reused? Back to that circular conversation again 🙂
So why am I bringing this up yet again? Because I was reminded this week – that there are INDEED projects out there – Canadian projects – that are indeed using older and historic datafiles. For instance check out: The GeoREACH Lab at UPEI – a FABULOUS use case for using historical data.
So…. back to my original question – is there VALUE in historical ag data? Should we spend the resources to uncover that hidden data trove of OAC research?
