Reprex | Green Deal Data Observatory

BeeSage: Data-driven Beekeeping for Productivity and Sustainability

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 12:00:00 +0000

BeeSage is an early stage startup which is contesting the The Hague Innovators Award in the pre-startup category. They are evangelizing data-driven beekeeping for productivity and sustainability, Reprex is an impact scale-up in the other category of this competition for more mature startups that is building collaborative, open scholarly data infrastructure, so-called data observatories to support the needs of various data-driven policy, business, or scientific innovation.

We met in the ImpactCity initiative of The Hague, and we’d like to build on The Hague impact startup ecosystem by combining our respective strengths so we decided to join forces! We both want to win in The Hague Innovators’ Challenge in 2022, but we only compete for the votes of the audience. Through our cooperation, we would like to increase the viability of BeeSage in the pre-startup category and increase the value proposition of Reprex in the startup category to the jury in ImpactFest.

Remote team of engineers in the Netherlands, Latvia and Portugal.

BeeSage modular beehive monitoring system boosts productivity and honey yield to benefit the Earth through data-driven pollination. Their software and hardware such as Smart Beehive Scales help beekeepers mitigate risks and enable informed decisions, while turning every apiary into a weather station.

They are also building HiveMap as a data analytics software, which enables beekeeper associations, environmental organizations and other stakeholders to turn beehive and remove sensing data into valuable insights. This product can be greatly enhanced through the latest data from Europe’s Copernicus satellites, from meteorological and air pollution sources. This is where Reprex’s Green Deal Data Observatory comes into the picture.

BeeSage is building HiveMap as a data analytics software.

Beekeepers associations, small research groups, or Ecotech startups cannot afford to build a full team of data engineers, data scientists, and statisticians to tap into components of raw inflation data (to find honey price or food value chain data), to create validated and continuously maintained data pipelines from environmental satellites, the data warehouses of Eurostat and the European Environmental Agency. They cannot hire small-area statisticians and ecological regression experts to create ecological and key business indicators for small tracts of land that are directly relevant to the health of a honeybee colony.

Reprex produces open-source scientific software, and various collaborative data engineering infrastructures to get legally open governmental data and open science data in a timely, usable format to ecological researchers, beekeeper associations, and Ecotech startups like BeeSage. The European Union legally opened up vast arrays of scientific and governmental data sources for commercial and scientific reuse, but investment into re-processing and validating data that was originally collected for a different primary cause requires plenty of private investment.

Reprex’s data observatories, particularly the Green Deal Data Observatory are public-private partnerships that foster the collective collection, processing, peer-review, and reuse of novel big data, like BeeSage’s beehive data, and reusable statistical and environmental data. We hope to place the permanent institution of this PPP in the Hague, which is already the World’s Smartest City, and which wants to remain a global centre of excellence of peace, justice, and sustainability in the era of big data and AI.

Reprex: Big Data For All

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 12:00:00 +0000

Reprex is the Hague-based impact startup developing decentralized, modern, web 3.0-compatible data observatories. Our mission is to fulfill parts of the SDG 16 and 17 goals: based on the open collaboration method of open-source software development and open knowledge management, we would like to enable impact makers to contribute to other SDG goals by making AI and big data work for them.

Table of Contents

Watch Our 2-min Introduction

⚙️/ Subtitles/ 🇳🇱 🇬🇧 🇧🇦 🇨🇿 🇭🇺 🇩🇪 🇱🇹 🇫🇷 🇸🇰 🇪🇸 🇹🇷 + Catalan.

How To Vote?

Go to Cast your vote for The Hague Innovators challenge 2022! and choose Reprex :)

Make sure you select Reprex and write in your email (it is safe here.) You need to tick `✅ I’m not a robot’ to be able to select companies. Further instructions 🇬🇧 here 🇭🇺 magyarul itt.

What do we do in the European Green Deal?

The Green Deal Data Observatory was our first test to bring our information management, data access, and processing know-how to new data sources (such as environmental satellite data, hydrological data, etc.) after music.
Due to the mainstreaming of SDG and ESG reporting, many features are developed with our music partners and overlap with the Competition Data Observatory.
We are looking for reliable data that can be processed into computational antitrust and policy evidence in relationship with SDG 11 to enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanization, SDG 12 to ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns, SDG 13 to take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts within the partnership approach of SDG 17.

Product

Our data observatories (platform products) cover our R&D and platform costs while giving us access to an expanding range of prime clients. We use 21-st century open-source data engineering solutions, a decentralized data governance method, and web 3.0 technologies to avoid conflicts of interest and prevent the data Sisyphus of error-prone human data wrangling. There is little competition on this service level (there are about 60 UN/EU/OECD recognized data observatories, and almost all of them are managed by a different operator.) This layer is already monetized, and we have proven success. Our unique advantage is a combination of legal and technological skills: understanding legally open data, web 3.0, and data modeling, and the ability to participate in the open-source statistical /scientific software creator community.
We create open-source software applications that fuel our data observatories with unprocessed, open, linked data. We create software for the R statistical environment, which is used in both official statistics and in many business and academic organizations. The production of R software components is a competitive field, but we believe that our position is strong: the vast majority of R packages are lightly or not at all serviced because of the lack of financing.

We provide bespoke analytics solutions to our institutional partners in our data observatories. Such bespoke solutions iterate over our existing software components, helping us design better applications within an ever-expanding ecosystem. Providing tailored data-science services would require a large organization without a clear focus. We provide these services on an ad-hoc basis only among institutional partners and users of our data observatories. In these circles, which are often prime clients, we face little or no competition because we are trusted partners and data and solution providers. This is a key to our revenue and market growth.
We develop high-value software-as-service applications that leverage our data observatory assets and our software solution into a novel, commercially valuable uses. Our applications are built around our family of open-source software and generalize our bespoke analytics solutions. We are in a late prototype phase where we already have some revenue and are trying to prepare for scaling up at the correct price with three of our applications. All of our applications are entering into highly competitive market segments. We are building on our ‘unfair’ advantage that we are bundling our solutions with data that is not accessible to competitors, and we can test them in the protected ecosystems of our observatories.

Plans in The Hague?

Our message is simple: doing business and doing good for the city of the Hague means a vote for Reprex. We would like to win the Hague Innovators Challenge in 2022 because we believe we could multiply our growth in partnership with the Hague. We have a significant budget to develop our observatories, and our company is already located in the Hague, in Apollo 14—but most of our team members, not to mention the observatory’s non-data personnel are not based in our beautiful and smart city. The observatories are important platforms for our growth, and they could create a lot more jobs and impact in the city than in our startup company. Should we win the prize, we would spend the 25,000 euros on one thing: to develop our observatories into a real public-private partnership in the Hague, with a permanent office in Apollo 14 or the Hague Humanity Hub.

stacodelists: use standard, language-independent variable codes to help international data interoperability and machine reuse in R

Wed, 29 Jun 2022 08:12:00 +0100

Visit the documentation website of statcodelists on statcodelists.dataobservatory.eu/.

The goal of statcodelists is to promote the reuse and exchange of statistical information and related metadata with making the internationally standardized SDMX code lists available for the R user. SDMX – the Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange has been published as an ISO International Standard (ISO 17369). The metadata definitions, including the codelists are updated regularly according to the standard. The authoritative version of the code lists made available in this package is https://sdmx.org/?page_id=3215/.

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Purpose

Cross-domain concepts in the SDMX framework describe concepts relevant to many, if not all, statistical domains. SDMX recommends using these concepts whenever feasible in SDMX structures and messages to promote the reuse and exchange of statistical information and related metadata between organisations.

Code lists are predefined sets of terms from which some statistical coded concepts take their values. SDMX cross-domain code lists are used to support cross-domain concepts. What are these cross-domain coded concepts?

Geographical codes, like NL: the Netherlands in the CL_AREA code list.
Standard industry codes J631 for Data processing, hosting and related activities in Europe. (NACE Rev 2 in Europe, beware, it is J592in Australia and New Zealand, see CL_ACTIVITY_ANZSIC06.)
Occupations, like OC2521 for Database designers and administrators in CL_OCCUPATIONS
Time fomatting standards, like CCYY for annual data series in CL_TIME_FORMAT.

Check out the available codlists on the package homepage.

The use of common code lists will help users to work even more efficiently, easing the maintenance of and reducing the need for mapping systems and interfaces delivering data and metadata to them. A very obvious advantage of using the code systems is that you can retrieve data from national sources indifferent of the natural language used in North Macedonia, Japan, the U.S. or the Netherlands. While the data labels may change to be locally human-readable, computers and geeks can read the codes and understand them immediately. Provided that they use the standard codes.

Our data observatories are rolling out SDMX coding across all datasets to help data ingestion and interoperability, data findability and data reuse. statcodelists can help the use of standard SDMX codes in your R workflow–both for downloading data from statistical agencies and to produce publication-ready datasets that the rest of the world (and even APIs) will understand.

Installation

You can install statcodelists from CRAN:

install.packages("statcodelists")

Further recommended code values for expressing general statistical concepts like not applicable, etc., can be found in section Generic codes of the Guidelines for the creation and management of SDMX Cross-Domain Code Lists.

For further codelists used by reliable statistical agency but not harmonized on SDMX level please consult the SDMX Global Registry Codelists page.

The creator of this package is not affiliated with SDMX, and this package was has not been endorsed by SDMX.

Code of Conduct

Please note that the statcodelists project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.