Have you heard of a data exchange? Yes, if a stock exchange is a place to buy and sell stocks, then a data exchange is a platform for distributing and trading data.

Last week, I visited an interesting place. It was the opening ceremony of a data exchange called 'Data Farm'. As you may have guessed from the word 'Data Farm', it provides data services that integrate public and private data related to agriculture and support decision-making in line with business and production cycles.

In the future, 'data farms' will process and handle raw data produced and owned by companies or related organizations, create highly usable products, and act as intermediaries to companies in demand.


▲ Various data are being collected through IoT. The photo is KT’s Giga Smart Farm.

In other words, it provides decision-making-based data on the production environment and factors of agricultural and livestock products according to regional characteristics, such as product and price data, pest/soil data, and demographic data by region, season, and time zone. It's a bit difficult to explain. I understood it as a place to trade meaningful data to support scientific agriculture.

In the future, the exchange will provide analysis data and raw data in the form of a dashboard by dividing services by data processing type, and will also allow data to be downloaded in the form of files such as API, XLS, CSV, and XML within the web service so that agricultural-related companies can easily use the service.

Lee Woo-young, CEO of SeeLab, said, “Data Farm is the first case of a private company attempting data distribution transactions. It is meaningful in finding value.” There is a lot of data derived, but we plan to activate data transactions in the agricultural sector by placing importance on the process of interpreting and analyzing it.

Those who attended the event also emphasized the importance of data in the IoT artificial intelligence era. Professor Lee Seung-ryong of Kyunghee University emphasized that while it is difficult to share medical data due to the risk of personal information leakage, it will be different in the agricultural field, and that developing basic studies and securing human resources have become more important.

NIA Director Lee Jae-ho said, “Current data is playing the role of oil and coal in the industrial revolution era. Quality and accuracy are important for data exchanges to become active, and these will determine the success of the exchange.” Professor Yoo Seong-jun of Sejong University also said, “In Korea, there is no environment for buying data, but if it is valuable data, it will be different.” Professor Yoo also pointed out that if data that creates additional value, that is, results that are already available, are utilized well, better results will be produced.

The data exchange 'Data Farm' plans to secure customer contact points through the Gangwon Creative Economy Innovation Center in the future and apply it to demand sources through customer analysis such as agricultural startups. We plan to expand our services by supporting data business validation.

If you use this exchange well, you will be able to obtain 'valuable analysis data' related to the environment of famous producing areas by variety, highly profitable agricultural products, and price predictions based on consumption trends.

I don't know how active this private enterprise-type data exchange will be in the future. However, in this era of data flooding, if many tools for processing and analyzing data by specialized fields are created, I cautiously predict that they will come together to complete true 'big' data.