AgReFed provides the socio-technical framework for independent organisations to come together to make strategic and technical decisions about sharing agricultural data and making agricultural data FAIR.
Social approach
AgReFed is a federated community of autonomous Data Provider Communities operating under cooperative principles to make agricultural data in Australia more discoverable and usable.
Membership of AgReFed is voluntary and open to all agricultural Data Provider Communities that contribute resources towards the collective vision of AgReFed and accept the responsibilities of membership.
AgReFed is democratically governed by the AgReFed Federation Council which is comprised of representatives from Data Provider Communities that steer the community's strategic direction and decisions.
Data Provider Communities are encouraged to be active participants of AgReFed and contribute to the ongoing efforts to improve data holdings through representation on the AgReFed Technical Committee.
AgReFed policies are endorsed by the AgReFed Federation Council and guide the collective and individual actions of both Data Provider Communities and the federated community.
Data Provider Communities align their data, repositories, and provisioning arrangements through jointly developed policies and procedures to help achieve the vision of FAIR agricultural data.
Technical approach
AgReFed is a distributed data community with Data Provider Communities making their data accessible through the AgReFed platform in ways that work for them, and comply with data access, and use requirements.
Data Provider Communities align their technical solutions through jointly developed AgReFed policies to help achieve the shared vision of FAIR agricultural data.
The AgReFed FAIR Data Policy and AgReFed Trusted Repository Policy set the acceptable levels of FAIR-ness and trustworthiness for data sharing through AgReFed.
Data Provider Communities use the AgReFed FAIR Data Self-Assessment and AgReFed Trusted Repository Self-Assessment to identify how data products and repositories can be improved incrementally.
AgReFed strives to use open-source data exchange standards, metadata standards and controlled vocabularies to aid the seamless integration of datasets and facilitate data sharing and reuse.
Data Provider Communities make their data interoperable through the adoption of agreed ontologies and vocabulary services, data structures, standard communication protocols and appropriate social architectures.
