HortiCube: A Platform for Transparent, Trusted Data Sharing in the Food Supply Chain

Food supply chains consist of many links and operate on a global scale with many stakeholders involved from farm to fork. Each stakeholder maintains data about food products that they handle, but this data is not transparently available to all other stakeholders in the chain due to various reasons. Trust and reciprocity for data sharing is limited and there is insufficient clarity in data ownership and possible legal consequences. However, various stakeholders could benefit from making data available across the supply chain. Food producers are very interested in consumer demands and trends. Growers also want to guide their supply based on the potential demand for specific food products in the near future. In addition, there are various other data sources that contain interesting data for these same stakeholders, such as import/export transactions, production (forecast) data, parcel crop information, local weather predictions and social media streams. To make all stakeholders in the food chain benefit from these data sources and to share data more transparently, the Dutch horticulture and food domain is developing the HortiCube platform via which various data sources are made accessible to application developers using a secure, linked data application interface. This paper describes the development of the HortiCube, the technologies being used and the lessons learned on aligning semantics by mapping of terms and the implementation performance using an example demo application.