Description:
PIs: Pascal Hitzler (Computer Science), Romulo Lollato (Agronomy)
Co-PIs: Kelsey Andersen Onofre (Plant Pathology), Hande McGinty (Computer Science), Katherine Nelson (Geography and Geospatial Sciences), Stephen Welch (Agronomy), Terry Griffin (Agricultural Economics), Stacy Hutchinson (College of Engineering), and Xiaomao Lin (Agronomy).
Changing climate, environmental, socio-political, and economic forces are increasingly straining the global food system’s ability to meet the food and fiber requirements of a growing human population. Despite rapid technological advances, the myriad of interdependencies in this complex system continues to hinder efforts to develop and implement solutions to challenges to food system sustainability in more than a piecemeal fashion. Recent growth in the development of Knowledge Graphs (KGs) as a method of data and knowledge management as well as using KGs to transform large-scale, diverse and complex data and knowledge into analysis offers a means of more systematically and efficiently addressing the complex interdependencies inherent in the global food system. In this project, we develop - with the guidance of stakeholders - a KG focused on sustainable intensification of wheat production as a first step in building a Global Food Systems Data Hub, concomitantly with seeding a Center for Sustainable Wheat Production. An expert elicitation workshop with the goal of defining sustainable wheat systems by major stakeholders across the entire wheat supply chain will kick off the project. Findings from this workshop will later guide the development of a wheat sustainability KG. Simultaneously, the utility of this KG will be illustrated through three wheat-related use cases relevant to the agricultural sector in Kansas and development of a public-facing Data Hub. These efforts will pave the way for Kansas State as the leader in sustainable agriculture data management, production, and application while simultaneously supporting a major economic sector for Kansas by enabling decision support for food security applications, development of policy and management solutions relevant to local stakeholders.