ACCELERATION OF INNOVATION
BY JAMIE ZACHARY
Agriculture experts say a new data-sharing initiative unveiled by Genome Alberta, Genome BC and RDAR could dramatically speed up the translation of research into real world impact on the farm.
The Agriculture Metadata Commons launched this past June is designed to catalogue research information that describes datasets on soils, crops, livestock and more into an easily searchable and standardized system.
“It’s basically the Yellow Pages of agricultural data,” said Tom Finn, senior sector innovation manager with Genome Alberta. Finn noted that agricultural research data has historically been siloed. This means it is often hidden across private servers or individual labs, which leads to duplicated efforts and missed opportunities for collaboration.
The Metadata Commons bridges these gaps by making existing data more discoverable. “Instead of running at dial-up internet speed, we’ll be running at fibre-optic speed,” said Mark Redmond, CEO of RDAR, a major Canadian agricultural research funder. “Speed is our currency. If we want profitable and resilient farms, we need to accelerate the adoption and scaling of these practices. The Metadata database is a pivotal link in the chain of technologies and processes that will help make that happen faster.”
Organizers of the project say what distinguishes this initiative is they are only cataloguing metadata—that is, information about the data—rather than the raw data itself. For example, the database contains project descriptions and sample information, as well as experimental setups such as whether a seed was collected from a field or a greenhouse. “This resource points you to where you need to get more information, start a collaboration and open up a conversation,”
said Finn.
To further encourage collaboration, researchers can share data descriptions rather than raw datasets. This helps potential partners discover relevant work while also allowing researchers to maintain control over their respective data.
Zsuzsanna Hollander is interim vice-president of research and innovation at Genome BC. She said the initiative was informed by lessons learned from similar work her organization previously undertook to improve access to health research metadata. To improve accessibility, they employed AI tools to make the complex genomics data more searchable, accessible and useful for researchers and farmers. “By incorporating AI, we make sure that people can ask those natural questions to search the database,” said Hollander.
Additionally, AI also scrapes metadata from existing research reports and then provides a first pass that researchers only need to audit and sign off on. “For the second phase, we want to go out and better understand what information producers are looking for and then develop AI models that will pull that information from research publications and have it in a more accessible format,” said Hollander. She added, the current platform underwent beta-testing with 14 labs before its launch.
Jeremy Boychyn, director of research, agronomy and extension at Alberta Grains, believes the Metadata Commons will ultimately strengthen the western Canadian research funding system. It will give the agriculture sector a better understanding of what research already exists, he said. It will also allow organizations to complement one another’s work rather than unknowingly duplicating it.
“All fields of research generate an enormous amount of information and data. By bringing it together in a way that helps people see the bigger picture—and doing so efficiently and, ideally, without bias—can help us extract more value from investments that have already been made,” said Boychyn. “This will be a good test case for Canadian agriculture.”
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