Big Data Initiatives from SAP Help Protect the Planet and Global Food Supply

SOURCE: SAP

In an effort to improve people’s lives, SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced initiatives that aim to use Big Data to help better understand the planet’s diversity and enhance food safety. The initiatives intend to use the SAP HANA® platform to collect and analyze data to help crowdsource the identification and analysis of species globally as well as identify fraud in the global food supply. The announcement was made at the SAP Big Data for Industries Influencer Event, being held July 10 in London.

Big Data Crowdsourcing Project Helps Better Understand the Planet’s Diversity
The International Barcode of Life (iBOL) project involves a consortium of institutions building a database containing DNA barcodes for every species on the planet. The database currently hosts more than 400,000 species. However to identify all the species on the planet, estimated at anywhere between 10 million to 100 million species, the International Barcode of Life project is looking to expand the number of people contributing to the research.

The urgency of this task is clear as species are disappearing from the planet at an alarming rate. To help tackle the problem, SAP and the International Barcode of Life project collaborated to build the LifeScanner application, available on iTunes to crowdsource the collection and analysis of all of this information. LifeScanner is an application that anyone can use on an iPhone to collect a tissue sample or whole organism, send it off for analysis and get the species identification using DNA barcodes from anywhere on the globe. The application uses SAP® SQL Anywhere® solutions to ensure data integrity and that it works in places where there may not be network connectivity.

The SAP University Alliances program plans to help crowdsource the analysis of data collected through the LifeScanner application. The published DNA barcode data is intended to be made available to researchers and students for analysis and to be accessed through SAP HANA, SAP® Lumira® software as well as other third-party analytics tools. The SAP University Alliances program’s global network includes more than 1500 universities in more than 80 countries worldwide.

“Whether it’s better understanding the human species, or any other animal or planet species, there is no doubt that Big Data gives us the opportunity to better understand life all around us,” said Irfan Khan, senior vice president and general manager, Database & Technology, SAP. “The volumes and sources of data continue to grow rapidly and using this information intelligently can help prevent the extinction of species, promote new life science discoveries and improve the health of life on our planet. The SAP HANA platform helps organizations better process Big Data so they can acquire, analyze and act on insights in real time.”

New Research Sponsored by SAP Helps Identify Fraud in the Food Industry
New research by the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario shows that food contamination and mislabelling is prevalent across the herbs and spices, as well as fish and seafood categories. The soon-to-be-published market studies investigated product authenticity of common herbs and spices in the marketplace such as thyme, cinnamon, cloves and chilli powder. Drawing on early findings from the research project, adulteration was indicated in one-third of the products tested. This included product substitution, contamination and use of fillers, which were not listed on the product label.

Additionally, new research on seafood fraud in Canada, which examines adulteration of seafood over time, suggests that product substitution in the marketplace remains high, with more than 20 percent mislabelling, despite repeated media exposure. This stands in contrast to studies in the UK that revealed a combination of increasing consumer awareness and regulatory enforcement resulted in a significant decrease in seafood fraud.

SAP and Tru-ID Explore Solutions to Help Identify Fraud in the Food Supply Chain
Traceability of food sources and confirmation of food product authenticity is difficult and time consuming. Most global supply chain visibility solutions in the food industry ensure strict processes and track packaging, but knowing what species are inside the package is challenging because many species can be hard to identify after processing. To help address this challenge and to identify fraud in the food supply chain, SAP and Tru-ID, a new member of the SAP Startup Focus program, are exploring solutions to increase visibility in the supply chain leveraging SAP HANA.

Integrating DNA-based verification testing and product authenticity certification into supply chain solutions from SAP will help companies identify the source of adulteration among their suppliers. Using SAP HANA Cloud Platform, companies will be able to require suppliers to share independently audited tests. This would give companies better visibility into the authenticity of the foods provided by their supply chain.

Customers are envisioned to be able to integrate these test results into supply chain visibility solutions from SAP, so they can address problems that may arise from food-quality problems such as determining the quality of the foods supplied by certain suppliers, initiating product recalls when food contamination or substitution is detected and identifying risk exposure by supplier and product.

In addition, Cafer Tosun, a senior vice president of Strategic Research and Innovation at SAP, has been appointed to the board of directors of the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario, which is a founding member of, and hosts the secretariat for, the International Barcode of Life (iBOL.org) consortium operating in 26 nations.

For more information, visit the SAP News Center. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.

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