The ATLAS Horizon 2020 project (Agricultural Interoperability and Analysis System) is developing an open, distributed, and extensible data platform based on a microservice architecture that will offer innovative, data-driven services in agriculture. Through the Open Call, ATLAS looks for proposals aiming to develop new and innovative services by making use of the technical foundation of the ATLAS platform. 
The proposed projects should be built on the platform and extend the use cases carried out within the ATLAS project and show clear value along the agricultural value chain. SMEs, start-ups, and farmers legally established and based in one of the EU Member States or an H2020 associated country are welcome to apply under the following topics:
- Weed and Pest Control
- Irrigation
- Asset Tracking and Fleet Management
- Efficient and Transparent Nutrient Cycle Reporting
- Behavioural Analysis and Management of Livestock
- Information Platform for Farmers
- Open Technology for innovative Agriculture
ATLAS will fund 5 to 10 business entities by allocating an average of EUR 52.500 per use case. The deadline for submission of proposals is the 15th of September 2020 (23:59 CEST). For the full package of information, you may visit the website and for questions about the open call please contact opencall@atlash2020.eu.
ATLAS Interoperability Reference Architecture
The overall objective of ATLAS is the development of an open digital interoperability system for agricultural applications and to build up a sustainable ecosystem for innovative data-driven agriculture. ATLAS will allow the flexible combination of agricultural machinery, sensor systems and data analysis tools to overcome the problem of lacking interoperability and to enable farmers to increase their productivity in a sustainable way by making use of the most advanced digital technology and data.
The ATLAS Network will define a service architecture providing hardware- and software-interoperability layers which enable the acquisition and sharing of data from a multitude of sensors and the analysis of this data using a multitude of dedicated analysis approaches. The concept of the ATLAS interoperability system comprises two complementary approaches to enable the exchange of data: cloud based interconnectivity and edge computing capabilities.
A dedicated architecture team consisting of several ATLAS consortium members has worked on the definition of the high level interoperability reference architecture. Currently, the details of these high level concepts are worked out, and first reference implementations are developed.
About the Authors:
Dr. rer nat. Stefan Rilling has a background in computer science and is working as researcher at Fraunhofer IAIS, being responsible for several research projects in the field of sensor-systems, data analysis and data visualization.
Manolis Tsantakis is an Agricultural Economist (MSc), Vice President and Projects’ Director of ETAM SA (Heraklio, Greece) and Member of the Board of Directors of ITANOS Ltd (ETAM's subsidiary in Nicosia, Cyprus).
