USDA
The National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), an agency within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, advances knowledge for agriculture, the environment, human health and well-being, and communities—all by supporting research, education, and extension programs in the U.S. Federal Land-Grant University System and other partner organizations. To this end, NIFA helps identify and fund important research, education, and extension programs at the state and local level, and provides program leadership in these areas.
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The National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) is using open source technologies from Jaspersoft (BI), Infobright (database) and Talend (data integration) to dramatically improve information sharing—including unstructured textual data—among key research institutions, internal research teams and the offices of the U.S. Congress.
Challenge
To facilitate its dual roles of oversight and leadership in government-sponsored research related to agriculture, health and environment, NIFA must efficiently and accurately extracting “impact and outcome” meaning from a huge—and growing—number of unstructured, primarily textual documents, then making it available both for analysis and public access. Their current Oracle solution with Crystal Reports required specialized staff - and huge upgrade costs to achieve the kind of structure, reporting and query support required.
To achieve the kind of structure, reporting and query support we required, we would need to upgrade to a new Oracle solution—priced at over $200,000. So we started looking for new solutions—especially those in the open source arena.
- Joe Barbano, NIFA
Solution
After a careful search trying to find technologies that would cut cost and more effectively meet its unique information management needs, NIFA has had great success in building the business intelligence platform using Jaspersoft for reporting and dashboards, Infobright for the analytic database and Talend for data integration.
With Ruby on Rails, we can deliver some very nice ad hoc queries that access the data through the Infobright technology. This gives us fast, highly efficient performance thanks to Infobright’s columnar architecture.
- Joe Barbano, NIFA
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