Final Report of the ODiL Project

The goal of the project was the development and operation of an open platform for the integrated, scalable, networked, and secure representation, communication, and processing of data and services for independently held private farms. It sought to enable actors in the agricultural value chain to connect with each other in order to share and securely exchange services, requirements, and data in a targeted and selective manner.  Farmers who participated in ODiL are still able to use the existing hardware and software information systems.

The Forschungsstelle RobotRecht was responsible for accompanying legal research. Issues it examined included the legality under German data protection law of processing employee position data, and the possibilities and limits of "data ownership" under current law. Since a right in respect of data similar to ownership does not exist in German law, alternatives were sought. In particular, it is possible for a right of disposal to be granted over particular data, or data which can subsequently be determined, by contractual agreement between the parties involved. For this purpose, within the framework of the project, a model contract was drafted which can be adapted specifically to the needs of the respective parties and also takes sufficient account of the interests of individual farmers and agricultural contractors.

On February 17, 2020, a final public workshop of the project was held at the 40th GIL (Society for Computer Science in Agriculture, Forestry and Food Industry) Annual Conference in Freising-Weihenstephan. On the same day, Paul Vogel, a graduate assistant at the Forschungsstelle, gave a lecture entitled "Data sovereignty under Agriculture 4.0". The paper, upon which the presentation was based, can be found on pages 331-336 of the Conference Proceedings at <https://gil-net.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/GIL_2020FK_LNI-gesamt.pdf>.

The project web page is at   Odil-Projectpage.