How it works
Human-centered process
Despite the increase in economic aid to the agricultural sector in recent years, both general citizens and farmers consider the support to food producers insufficient. The lack of technological resources and generational renewal adds to the complex administrative structure that must be dealt with to access to public funds, as reported by a large number of SMEs that we had the opportunity to interview. Today, without even having finished solving the problems of the past decade, this sector faces a new wave of changes that will condition production in the near future: the ecological transition. At a time when the European Union is preparing to increase subsidies for the greening and digitalisation of agriculture, it is more important than ever to launch applications aimed at SMEs in the sector to access clear and simple information that allow them to bring the European institutions closer together.
Utility
The aim of dataseeds is to help SMEs working in agriculture to have direct access to better and more detailed information regarding the coming changes in accordance to the European Green Deal and the inevitable climate change. Do you remember the avatar tree? A tree that would hold the knowledge of all its community. That is open data today. In this regard, the interface would encompass on the one hand, information and data on the production, packaging, transport, and waste processes, and on the other hand, the opinion of EU citizens as consumers. Multiple datasets are used to help SMEs reduce and control their flows concerning the Green Deal requirements – most of them are dynamic and continuously updated and some have a participatory approach.
Open Data
Dataseeds is built on the premise to democratize open data information to smallholder agriculture. The European Data Portal offers 90,883 datasets on open environment data, which could help SMEs be more competitive, yet sustainable if used well. However, the quantity of data is such that it makes it very complex to find and use. We have used the sources of information that the EU makes available to citizens, such as the databases of the European Environment Agency, European Data Portal, Publications Office of the EU, Joint Research Centre and CORDIS. The legislative material has been drawn mainly from EUR-LEX and Lexparency, winner of the legal-tech challenge at the EU Datathon 2018.
Front-end Stack
The frontend of the page is made with the usual web technologies of HTML + CSS + JS. But apart from that, Jekyll was also used, which is a great open source static site generator. This let us concentrate more on the contents of the page as it eased managing dozens of static pages, and also allowed us to use Markdown for blog posts and Liquid in HTML for a less tedious coding. The webpage is totally open sourced in our Github repo and is also hosted there thanks to the amazing (and free) GitHub Pages, which is a static site hosting service that comes together perfectly with Jekyll (which the cofounder of GitHub created).
Data visualisation
The webpage wouldn't be the same without the maps, charts and visualizations scattered around the different sections. Each one of them was created from scratch with datasets from the EU Open Data Portal. Finally, the data was processed and explored in Python with the Pandas library, and then a graph was created around the chosen data. All the graphs and charts were made with the Plotly library, which is a wonderful interactive graphing library for Python .
Used sources
This page was also created with the help of a set of amazing open source libraries and
frameworks used to
build and manage both the website and the content. But a special thanks need to be provided
to the amazing
vectorized icons from Drawkit, and the entirety of the datasets and information collected
from a variety
of sources: EEA, Eurostat, EUR-lex, EIB, CORDIS and JRC.
Datasets: EEA, Eurostat, EUR-Lex, EIB, REGIO, INEA, CORDIS, JRC.
Vectorized icons from