Big data is becoming a hype that is going to completely redefine industries within very traditional sectors like agriculture, food and beauty. The emergence of niche big data companies like Enolytics (“bringing big data insights to the wine industry”) is threatening to disrupt these industries against the interests of the EU. BigDataGrapes wants to build upon the rich historical, cultural and artisan heritage of Europe in order to change this picture. It aims to support all European companies active in two key industries powered by grapevines: the wine industry and the natural cosmetics one. It will help them respond to the significant opportunity that big data is creating in their relevant markets, by pursuing two ambitious goals: a. To develop and demonstrate powerful, rigorously tested, cross-sector data processing technologies that go beyond-the-state-of-the-art towards increasing the efficiency of companies that need to take important business decisions dependent on access to vast and complex amounts of data, and assess them in challenges informed by the grapevine-powered industries. b. To create a large-scale, mulifaceted marketplace for grapevine-related data assets, increasing the competitive advantage of companies that serve with IT solutions these sectors and helping companies and organisations evolve methods, standards and processes to help them achieve free, interoperable and secure flow of their data. BigDataGrapes is targeting technology challenges of the grapevine-powered data economy as its business problems and decisions requires processing, analysis and visualisation of data with rapidly increasing volume, velocity and variety: satellite and weather data, environmental and geological data, phenotypic and genetic plant data, food supply chain data, economic and financial data and more. It therefore makes a perfectly suitable cross-sector and cross-country combination of industries that are of high European significance and value.

The New Delivery Model established in Regulation EU 2115/2021 entails significant changes to Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) governance with the introduction of Strategic Plans and new monitoring, review and evaluation requirements. The CAP is expected to contribute significantly to the Green Deal’s ambitions, securing the achievement of sustainability and resilience goals for the EU’s Agri-food systems. Innovative governance models are essential to enable result-based policymaking to deliver the best policy pathways to facilitate the green transition. Tools4CAP will (1) support the implementation of National Strategic Plans 2023-2027, and (2) lay the foundations for sound preparation of Post-2027 Strategic Plans. Accordingly, Tools4CAP establishes a flexible and participatory Coordination & Support Action designed to boost learning, exchange processes, and adoption of innovative solutions and good practices for the design, monitoring and evaluation of CAP Strategic Plans. Tools4CAP’s methods and tools will cover three key areas: (1) quantitative modelling tools for ex-ante and ex-post evaluations, (2) participatory and multi-governance decision tools, and (3) novel data and monitoring solutions. The project will deliver a comprehensive inventory of methods and tools used in the 27 Member States, methodological guidelines on innovative solutions and a Handbook of good practices. Results will be integrated in a Capacity Building Toolkit, designed to enhance science-policy interfaces. Tools4CAP utilises a Stakeholder Engagement Platform to boost bottom-up adaptation of innovative methods and tools. It will establish a Replication Lab to demonstrate their use in 10 Member States and to promote their uptake across the EU-27. The project will also set up a Capacity Building Hub to help end-users (ministries, management authorities, paying agencies, other stakeholders) reinforce their capacity to use innovative tools, including models used by the European Commission.

STELAR will design, develop, evaluate, and showcase an innovative Knowledge Lake Management System (KLMS) to support and facilitate a holistic approach for FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and AI-ready (high-quality, reliably labeled) data. The STELAR KLMS will allow to (semi-)automatically turn a raw data lake into a knowledge lake. This is achieved by (1) enhancing the data lake with a knowledge layer, and (2) developing and integrating a set of data management tools and workflows. The knowledge layer will comprise: (a) a data catalog offering automatically enhanced metadata for the raw data assets in the lake, and (b) a knowledge graph that semantically describes and interlinks these data assets using suitable domain ontologies and vocabularies. The provided tools and workflows will offer novel functionalities for: (a) data discovery and quality management; (b) data linking and alignment; and (c) data annotation and synthetic data generation. The KLMS will combine both human-in-the-loop and automatic approaches, to leverage background knowledge of domain experts while minimizing their involvement. To reduce manual effort and time, it will increase the automation of finding and selecting relevant data sources, configuring, and tuning the involved data management tools, and designing, executing, and monitoring end-to-end data processing workflows adapted to different user needs. The KLMS will include specialized tools and functions for geospatial, temporal, and textual data. An organization, ranging from a data-intensive SME to the operator of a data marketplace, will be able to use the STELAR KLMS to increase the readiness of its data assets for use in AI applications and for being shared and exchanged within a common data space. The STELAR KLMS will be pilot tested in diverse, real-world use cases in the agrifood data space, one of the nine data spaces of strategic societal and economic importance identified in the European Strategy for Data.

The discussion on the modernisation of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is in full progress and one element is how the CAP will benefit from and stimulate ongoing digitisation of the agricultural sector. Digitisation accelerates a cost-effective administration of CAP payments, the update of CAP instruments, stimulates data (re) use for monitoring the societal benefits of agriculture towards climate, environment and rural development and thus improves the sustainability and competitiveness of the sector. Administrative bodies from 9 EU Member States join forces to realise a new vision on the Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS) – the instrument for CAP governance – in this project called: “New IACS Vision in Action” (NIVA). The project is built on an iterative work plan. This ensures fast results, built-in flexibility and greater involvement of stakeholders. NIVA strives for maximum impact by involving all EU paying agencies and other relevant actors in the stakeholder board, by reserving a substantial budget for supporting third parties and the set-up of an innovation ecosystem that will continue after the project. NIVA manages cross cutting digital innovations as well as standardization issues in dedicated work packages as defining, accepting and defending common standards is exemplifying the desire for collaboration. The nine prime use cases are demonstrated in three waves, from national to multi-national to pan-European, hence underlining our ambition to make a significant contribution to improved digital competences, awareness and innovation at the European scale. The project’s results are a suite of digital innovations and a roadmap for IACS transformation. The project will speed up innovation, reduce administrative burden, sustain broader and deeper collaboration in an innovation ecosystem and provide methods to establish information flows to improve environmental performance.