Multi-Dimensional Data Preparation: A Process to Support Vulnerability Analysis and Climate Change Adaptation

Agriculture is the backbone of a country’s economic system, considering that it not only provides food and raw materials but also employment opportunities for a large percentage of the population. In this way, determining the degree of agricultural vulnerability represents a guide for sustainability and adaptability focused on changing future conditions. In many cases, vulnerability analysis data is restricted to use by authorized personnel only, leaving open data policies aside. Furthermore, data in its native format (raw data) by nature tend to be diverse in structure, storage formats, and access protocols. In addition, having a large amount of open data is important (though not sufficient) to obtain accurate results in data-driven analysis. These data require a strict preparation process and having guides that facilitate this process is becoming increasingly necessary. In this study, we present the step by step processing of several open data sources in order to obtain quality information for feedback on different agricultural vulnerability analysis. The data preparation process is applied to a case study corresponding to the upper Cauca river basin in Colombia. All data sources in this study are public, official and are available from different web platforms where they were collected. In the same way, a ranking with the importance of variables for each dataset was obtained through automatic methods and validated through expert knowledge. Experimental validation showed an acceptable agreement between the ranking of automatic methods and the ranking of raters. The result of this study corresponds to 16 processed data sources ready to feed data-driven systems, as well as agricultural vulnerability methodologies.