About FarmStack

What is FarmStack?

FarmStack is a reference implementation of open protocol in agriculture sector that enables data collaboration between different entities. It does this by providing a means to:

1. Share data directly without the need of third party through trusted peer to peer (p2p) connector

2. Empower the data provider to restrict usage of data by the receiver through usage policies

3. Publish and discover connectors and usage policies defined according to open standards

4. Install trusted containerised applications within connector to use in-memory data

5. Enable organisations to create plugins to make their data discoverable (description of data)

Why is FarmStack required?

FarmStack is required because:

• Complete farmer profile including farmer activity not available

• Lack of trust on misuse or under utilisation of data with a centralised data warehouse

• Need to comply with evolving data policy and privacy safeguarding measures

Value generated by FarmStack

• By combining specific datasets, better services or products can be created

• Organisations can discover what data resides with whom to foster collaboration

• Potential to unlock value of data that was previously considered not shareable

• More feedback from lead to more enriching solution - giving rise to virtuous cycle

How will someone use FarmStack?

• There are two ways to use p2p connectors: a) data providers can set up the entire p2p connector or b) service based model where FS team can deploy the connector

• No difference between the two in terms of functionality of data exchange

• Available resources:

  • Central place to download a p2p connector (github repo)

  • Help guide to set up a p2p connector

    • Documents

    • Tutorials

    • Videos

• UI to manage data sharing

  • UI to configure p2p connector

    • Container network

    • Services (endpoints, auth mechanism etc)

    • Routes

  • UI to configure usage policy for consumers

  • UI to manage activity log

  • UI to manage certificates

  • UI to manage which catalog service to be used

Examples of policy based usage control (not comprehensive list)

This is just to give examples of usage policies for the purpose of documentation. This is not the immediate usage policy.

Below are the categories of use cases and examples for that. The categorization is a) usage oly, b) view only, c) share, d) download and e) stored.

1. Not visible - available for operations alone

   1. Usage of data fields restricted to specific operations like joining

   2. Usage of data fields restricted to specific operations requiring logging

   3. Usage of data fields restricted to specific operation limiting number of times operations can be made

      1. Revoke usage

      2. Delete data

   4. Usage of data fields restricted to specific operations for a certain time period

      1. Revoke usage

      2. Delete data

2. Visible with constraints

   1. Data available for viewing for specific time period

      1. Revoke access

      2. Delete data

   2. Specific data fields can be viewed by specific persons in specific organizations

3. Shareable with constraints

   1. Can be shared to specific organizations (IP list) with them only able to view

   2. Can be shared with logging and notifications

   3. Can be shared with limited number of times

      1. Revoke permission to share

      2. Delete data

   4. Can be shared for a limited amount of time

      1. Revoke permission to share

      2. Delete data

   5. Can share only specific data fields

4. Downloadable with constraints

   1. Can download specific data fields

5. Stored with constraints

   1. Can be stored but in encrypted form at specific instance

   2. Can be stored for usage only for specific operations

   3. Can be stored for usage only for specific time and operations