Unlocking the promises of Big Data requires a clear vision, a talented and agile cross-disciplinary team, and an agile but long-term commitment to developing the tools and systems required to tackle the real world challenges of turning data into actionable information. This is the challenge G.E.M.S® — an international agroinformatics initiative jointly led by the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resources Sciences (CFANS) and the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) at the University of Minnesota — is tackling head on.

GEMS is the first and the only system designed from the very start to support and functionally integrate spatially and temporally distributed genomic, environmental, management, and socioeconomic data in a single integrated platform.