Damien Powell
Delivery Director
ABACO SPA
Italy

Biography
Damien Powell is the UK Delivery Director for Abaco SPA. Prior to joining Abaco, Damien has spent 20 years working for Management Consultancy firms in the UK and specializes in providing solutions to assist Member States in the delivery of administration, control and payment of EU subsidies (CAP) to farmers. Damien has also recently been working on bringing innovation and technology to International Development Programmes specifically in the use of tools for ‘Monitoring & Evaluation’ in Fragile States such as Afghanistan.

Abstract
A land Knowledge Management System for Agriculture

ABACO has been an early integrator of geospatial technologies in Agriculture Information Systems with a focus on empowering agriculture stakeholders to make better decision, whether they are Public Authorities, Ministries of Agriculture and Farmers. Among the main initiatives in the European Union, all Member States are required to run a geospatial enabled system known as IACS to support the farming industry and to manage the agricultural budget wisely. ABACO was the first European company delivering an IACS system that is now among the most used platforms around the European Union. The landscape of digital data management and portable application is now driving through Open Data and Transparency to Farm Advisory Systems requiring to implement new solutions to deliver added value services to the agricultural community. As part of this experience we are presenting a recent though widely used technological platform called SITI AGRI Knowledge seamlessly collating agriculture spatial related data that can be used to have a better knowledge of the land, helping farmers in their daily operations and decision makers to support agriculture sectors. By configuring a land knowledge system, this platform caters for agricultural, environmental and economical aspects of the farming business, while monitoring agricultural activities and publishing added value services through standard interfaces that work on mobile devices. The SITI AGRI platform simplifies the development of new solutions for the farming industry incorporating advanced techniques like land knowledge tables, procedural texturising and augmented reality.