Creating territorial intelligence through a digital knowledge ecosystem : a way to actualize farmer empowerment

When properly combined territorial intelligence and ICT may contribute to strengthen the skills of a territory, to understand its phenomena, to interpret local dynamics involving targeted citizens, institutions and organizations. Among the others, the domain of sustainable agriculture production could benefit from mobile technology both in terms of single user data collector and support in daily activities, and in terms of user community data processing. In this way, the territory itself could contribute to the construction of a collective meaning, take advantage of collective knowledge, produce innovation in the management activities, and create cross-fertilization in terms of added value for different domains. This paper presents a technological solution conceived to increase the automation process for knowledge creation and sharing. On the basis of a digital knowledge ecosystem, users are allowed to query thematic datasets and visualize (geolocated) information. Each new information produced by the ecosystem through aggregating and mining processes can be in turn integrated as a resource belonging to the heritage of the spatially enabled territory.