D6.3 State of the Art

Big data technologies have shown significant benefits in many sectors of society, as diverse as manufacturing, business management and health science. This report looks at the state of the art of big data technologies and their application in bioeconomy, i.e. the parts of the economy that use renewable biological resources from land and sea – such as crops, forests, fish, animals and micro-organisms – to produce food, materials and energy. The DataBio project in particular, addresses agriculture, forestry and fishery, where it aims to advance the use of big data technologies by implementing several pilot demonstrations. The purpose of the document is to provide an overview for the general public and non-expert readers of recent developments in big data and highlight opportunities of how it could serve the bioeconomy sector in the near future. The document is structured as follows: Chapter 3 of the document includes an overview of general big data challenges and opportunities. Chapter 3.1 introduces the concept of big data in general and chapter 3.2 introduces the use of big data in the bioeconomy sector. Big data management, analysis and visualisation are discussed in chapters 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5 respectively. Finally, chapter 3.6 introduces big data frameworks and infrastructures. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 go into more detail covering big data in agriculture, forestry and fishery from the perspectives of the DataBio pilots. Due to the different backgrounds and target applications in each pilot application, these chapters present the state of the art from slightly different perspectives. Chapter 7 concludes with an outlook to future opportunities in big data technologies.