FarmStack is a digital infrastructure that enables data collaboration between different entities. It does this by providing a means to:
- Share data directly to the relevant organisation without the need of third party through p2p connector (peer to peer connector)
- Empower the data provider to specify how data can or cannot be used by the receiver through data owner defined usage policies
- Enable organisations to make their data discoverable by publishing metadata (description of data) and data transformation services in data catalog
- Personalised advisory to the farmers require complete farmer profile which does not exist
- Lack of trust on misuse or under utilisation of data for centralised data repository
- Need to comply with evolving data policy and privacy safeguarding measures
- By combining specific datasets, better services or products can be created
- Organisations can discover the p2p connectors and respective policies for accessing data
- Potential to unlock value of data that was previously considered not shareable
- More the feedback from farmers is combined, more enriching the solution can be
Business roles in FS can be viewed as layered operational spheres:
- FS Participants: These are stakeholders who are actually performing data exchange or providing some services (maybe in future, like discovery services) for data exchange. This could be a provider, a consumer etc
- FS Central/ Steward: This is a nodal agency/ consortium who will run FS in that geography/ jurisdiction. They will operate the gateways for the participants. Examples could be Ministry Of Agriculture or a global consortium.
- FS Core: This is the technology stack that is maintained by DG and consortium based on IDS technology stack (Fraunhofer) which consists of the code repo under MIT/ Apache license. They will own the master services agreement - governance structure and the right to provision instance of FS central.
Example: Consider the diagram, there are two instances of FS run by two independent central bodies in different jurisdictions. Let us say MoA of Country1 and Country2 run separate instances of FarmStack C1 and C2 which have participants P1… Pn who do data exchange between each other. By provisioning FS, C1 and C2 run FS on their server in addition to managing the organisations.
