Big data promises and obstacles: Agricultural data ownership and privacy

The year 2022 marks the ten-year anniversary of the White House's Big Data Research and Development Initiative. While this initiative, and the others it spawned, helped to advance the many facets of data intensive research and discovery, obstacles and challenges still exist. If left unaddressed these obstacles will persist and at a minimum limit the potential of what can be achieved by harnessing the many new ways to collect, analyze, and share data and the insights that can be drawn from them. The opportunities and challenges related to Big Data in agriculture touch on all aspects of the general research data lifecycle; from instruments used to gather data, to advanced digital platforms used to store, analyze, and share data, and the innovative insights from using advanced computational methods. The eight papers included in this special issue were chosen in part because they highlight both the challenges and the opportunities that come from all stages of the data lifecycle common across agricultural research and development. These papers grew out of several workshops made possible by the support of the Midwest Regional Big Data Hub, which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.