BAB 012/05: Structuring and management of the data pool

Work on facilitating access to and use of the INVEKOS data has so far been carried out mainly by Department II/1 of the BML. The current scope of the data offered is documented in the form of a description of the tables available in the respective year and their contents. Regular evaluations from the data pool are used, among other things, to prepare the BML's Green Report, to evaluate the Austrian Rural Development Program, to prepare the national agricultural accounts and to support research projects. A new query and evaluation system was developed and presented to the BML for the retrieval of anonymized individual farm accounting data. It is used to provide data for research purposes.

Objective

Numerous surveys and data analyses are carried out by or on behalf of the BML, which regularly (annually, monthly, weekly) provide certain data sets. These include the agricultural structure surveys, surveys of acreage, stocks, producer prices, the agricultural accounts and foreign trade statistics of Statistics Austria, IN-VEKOS and subsidy data of the AMA, accounting data of the LBG, GIS data of Department II/4 of the BML or farm and land registers of the LFRZ. In addition, the BML has extensive databases on groundwater quality, biodiversity and forestry. There are links and connections between individual data sources that make it possible to carry out specific analyses for a combination of data from several sources.

The aim of this project is to compile an overview of the various surveys and data sources and their content, to recognise discrepancies between the data stock and the data requirements and to establish compatibility between the available data stocks.
All data available to the Federal Institute of Agriculture and Mountain Farming (BAB) and the department are to be summarised and made quickly and easily accessible via interfaces, while fully safeguarding data protection and data security.
In addition, monthly and annual data on the development of issues and markets relevant to agriculture are to be made available in an up-to-date form on the homepage of the Federal Office of Agriculture and Mining.

Work 2025

• Ongoing maintenance work and improvements to the INVEKOS data pool
• Maintenance of the municipal database and presentation for the professional public
• Maintenance of data stocks and improvement of interfaces for the price portal preise.agrarforschung.at
• Maintenance of forecast data in ALFIS
• Further integration of the IDB database into ALFIS (new forms for creating and maintaining IDB characteristics, import of plant protection costs)
• ALFIS, which was taken over by the LFRZ, will continue to be maintained by Section II/1 of the BMLUK and the BAB. The associated tasks were evaluated and made more efficient in cooperation.
• Expansion and maintenance of Apache Airflow data pipelines
• Experiments with alternative ETL technologies such as Apache Spark
• The geodata of the regional classifications (agricultural production areas, agricultural locations, alpine regions) compiled annually by the BAB were adapted to the new regional status.
• The regional classifications (agricultural production areas, agricultural locations, alpine regions) compiled annually by the BAB and the evaluations based on them were adapted to the new regional status 04/2025, and the geodata is continuously made publicly available in accordance with the INSPIRE Directive. 
• Programming of a new tool for querying foreign trade data (completion in 2026)

Work 2026

• Conversion and programming of the existing online tables of agricultural and economic data on the BAB homepage and the Green Report to the new ‘Tables online’ web area
• Programming of a separate website for ‘Tables online’
• Ongoing maintenance and further development of the price portal preise.agrarforschung.at. The following work would be useful, but can only be partially implemented in 2026 due to the available resources: 
  - Expansion to include additional
  - products (auction prices, market prices for fruit and vegetables, etc.)
  - Improvement of the price portal's web interface (e.g. optimisation for smartphones, individual compilation of data)
  - Expansion of automated data transfer (web scraping, ransfer of data via paid services)
  - Integration of quality checks during data transfer
  - Improved rights management
• Integration, restructuring and updating of additional and existing data in BAB-ALFIS
• Further optimisation of existing ALFIS scripts is planned.
• The description blocks (meta information) of the ALFIS features will be revised and adapted to requirements
• Pogramming of a new tool for querying foreign trade data (see above!)
• Expansion of predefined evaluation options and reports from data in the foreign trade database. This is useful as it allows users to quickly perform periodic evaluations.
• Updates and further development of the municipal database (GeDaBa) and integration of new features
• Integration of the data pool into the conceptual creation of an evaluation data pool for the implementation evaluation of the current CAP Strategic Plan (2023-27) as well as for the upcoming ex-post evaluation of the CAP.
• Designing an expansion of the use of PostGIS databases
• Designing further possible uses for aerial photographs from the federal and state aerial photography cooperation
• Cross-referencing agricultural data with GIS data
• Networking in the field of geodata with related institutions within the framework of the BMLUK's GIS Jour Fixe
• Continuation of cooperation with Department IV/3 (Water Resources) regarding the Hydrographic Data Management System (HyDaMS). The database has been running productively on the BAB's ICT infrastructure since 2021 and is available to Department IV/3. In 2024, the BAB 069/24 Open Source Data Pipeline & Database for HyDaMS project was launched to improve access to the data in HyDaMS via an open source database. The operation of the proprietary HyDaMS database will continue on behalf of Dept. IV/3 in 2026.
• Operation of the big data processing infrastructure and the underlying Kubernetes cluster
• Further development of the data pool
  - Node-based concept, load-distributed queries
  - GPU acceleration, machine learning and deep learning integration using TensorFlow and PyTorch- Implement
  - web-based data visualisation and reporting
  - Expansion and maintenance of Apache Airflow data pipelines
•  The geodata on regional divisions (agricultural production areas, agricultural locations, alpine regions) compiled annually by the BAB has been adapted to the new regional status. Since 2023, the geodata has been harmonised in accordance with the INSPIRE Directive, hosted as data and view services (previously commissioned by the Federal Environment Agency) and made available via the national and European INSPIRE portal, in compliance with the additional requirements of the HighValueDataset Regulation.
• Preparation of various regional evaluations and map representations
• Collaboration on the REST-GDI-Agrar project of the Federal Environment Agency on behalf of the BMLUK. The project goal is to create a geodata infrastructure (GDI) concept and its prototype implementation for the digitisation of agriculture and the strengthening of rural areas. Specifically, BAB is working on the technical implementation of a use case scenario application in these GDI prototypes.
• Expansion and updating of BAB's internal geodata collection for event-related evaluations
• Operation and expansion of aerial image provision and long-term archiving of aerial images from the federal and state aerial image cooperation. The underlying ICT infrastructure and the storage and archiving concepts were developed and established in the BAB 048/21 project Image matching of aerial images using graphics processors to create current surface models.

Further work 2026

•  At the request of Department II/6, a brief evaluation (only relating to livestock and meat) will be produced each month in addition to the online offering.
• In 2026, the strategic orientation and further development of the data pool, which is subject to considerable change in terms of its design and implementation due to ongoing technical innovations, will be further advanced and implemented.
• Continuation of the restructuring and consolidation of all data available at both the BAB and the BMLUK.