Industry Collaboration Enables Big Data Analytics

About

AquaCloud was established in 2017 and is a big data project anchored in the aquaculture industry’s need to solve common challenges in order to create sustainable growth.

The project is part of NCE Seafood Innovation and began together with cluster members Lerøy Seafood Group ASA, Grieg Seafood ASA, Mowi ASA, Bremnes Seashore AS, Lingalaks AS, Eide Fjordbruk, and Bolaks AS. The project has developed substantially since 2017, and today the project involve a even broader group of leading aquaculture companies.

The initial scope of this groundbreaking initiative was to establish a secure database for storing data and to use advanced analytics to identify where sea lice outbreaks were probable. This part of the project celebrated some success. However, data quality and dependability were insufficient to reach the ambitious goals at the time.

At the core of the project is still the Data Platform which receives continuous updates from participating companies and represents a unique repository of high-resolution data from their farming operations. While observing obvious legal and competitive limitations, selected datasets will be shared both between participants and even made generally available to third parties for innovation.

The project has evolved from being a pure sea lice forecasting asset to become a hub of industry activities including companies from multiple sectors in the industry. Based on the initial findings of lacking data quality, the project launched several workflows addressing standardization needs in the industry:

• Sensor Data – an open IoT-based standard allowing equal access to aquaculture sensors and systems
• Fish Health – common standards for areas such as mortality causes and fish group identification as well as digital information exchange between various health and welfare entities
• Environmental Data – reviewed the environmental section of NS9417 standard on unambiguous terminology and methods for documentation of production