The EDF2012 organising team is happy to announce Karl Morteo of the Food and Agricultural Organisation of United Nations (FAO) as an invited talk speaking about the FAO Data Portal: data.fao.org.
 
http://data.fao.org is a one-stop shop that aggregates, integrates, and catalogues data from multiple sources within the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (UNFAO). These entries cover topics related to nutrition, food and agriculture and include data such as statistics, maps, pictures, documents and more. The overall objective is to strengthen the Organization’s capacity to collect, analyze, interpret, and disseminate information relating to nutrition, food and agriculture. We anticipate increased data utilisation, consistency and quality and efficiency gains through consolidation, de-duplication and improved ease of access.

The approach we are taking is to unify fragmented and “linear” systems to establish an organisational corporate data repository. This  corporate data repository being a reliable, robust, secure and scalable facility to store, organise, integrate, locate and retrieve interdisciplinary substantive and scientific knowledge, information and data.
 
Excerpt of the Weblog odf the FAO Data team:
When data.fao.org goes live, it will contain an immense about of resources. The site has already over 313,300 maps and 16,729,870 statistics uploaded. We expect this to rapidly grow to 30 terabytes of data and beyond, including photographs, statistics, maps, and documents.
 
To put the numbers into perspective, let’s think about them in terms of things that we can visualize. For example, if we wanted to print off all of the data from data.fao.org we would have to destroy 20,480,000 trees to make enough paper. Lining the paper up, it would stretch 13 football fields long or, stacked up, would be three times the height of the Empire State Building. The data would weigh in as much as 953 adult elephants.
 
Karl Morteo is Project Manager for http://data.fao.org and will speak at the EDF2012 on the 2nd conference day, 7 June 2012!