The newest in the series of popular GODAN/CTA Webinars, aired on the 20th of February 2019, is now available to view.

GODAN Action’s partners have been working to enhance data standards and promote best practice to improve interoperability. This Webinar talks through the work and findings of the project, and showcases resources available to support the standardisation of data to tackle food security. In particular, it focuses in on a newly developed service that allows tabular data provided as CSV files to be validated, automatically enriched with data from standard reference datasets, and converted into standard formats that can be easily imported into a variety of online mapping and GIS tools. The Land Portal shares their experience and how they intend to use the service in their work as data aggregators, in order to demonstrate how the service can be used to help standardise and geo-reference data.

About the Presenters

Deborah Yates is a data governance specialist at the Open Data Institute. She has worked on data governance and led culture change through open data in the public sector. She led the programme of work at the Environment Agency to embed ‘open by design’ into business as usual and worked with information asset owners to understand and improve data management practices across the organisation. Deborah’s passion for open data stems from her practical experience in applying data policy and seeing the great potential to achieve so much more when data is open.

Marcello De Maria is a researcher and data analysis at the Land Portal Foundation and has been a consultant, among others, for the Italian National Institute of Agricultural Economics (CREA, ex-INEA). Also, he is currently completing his second PhD at the School of Agriculture, Policy and Development — University of Reading (UK). He joined the Land Portal with the belief that improving land governance is one of the main challenges that the world is facing today, and that linked open data technologies and standards can play a major role in creating an accessible and inclusive information ecosystem, improving decisions and policies in the land sector.