NatData: A Platform to Integrate Geospatial Data from Natural Resources of the Brazilian Biomes

There are numerous challenges for sustainable agriculture. One of them is to provide an inventory of natural resources, to allow their evaluation for a sustainable use in production systems for food, fiber, essences and energy. The generation and maintenance of this inventory requires efforts of strategic innovation management in order to reduce errors, inconsistencies and unpredictability, replacing them with precise diagnosis, monitoring, early exploration of problems, needs and requirements. Then, it should act as a guide for investment in organization of knowledge and generation of technology flows. This requires an easier access to organized and integrated data about natural resources of different biomes. however, this access is often hampered by a number of reasons, mainly due to their volume and heterogeneity. This paper describes the NatData platform, which is under development at the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa). It intends to overcome the challenges, aiming to integrate data from Brazilian natural resources, preserving their semantic and allowing different users to access the data.