Nikos Manouselis
Founder and CEO of Agroknow

Presentation title:
My 20-Year Journey in Metadata and Semantics

In this keynote talk, Nikos Manouselis will reflect on a 20-year journey shaped by metadata, semantics, and agrifood data infrastructures. His path spans early contributions to agricultural repositories and scientific networks, the AGINFRA initiative that advanced global interoperability, and the Open Harvest convenings that reframed how agrifood information is shared, linked, and reused. Building on these foundations, he founded Agroknow, a company that evolved from metadata aggregation and discovery services into a vehicle for large-scale, ontology-driven data integration supporting global initiatives. This groundwork enabled platforms such as AGRIS to enhance research discoverability across the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) ecosystem, and ultimately set the stage for FOODAKAI’s emergence as a global food-risk intelligence system used by leading food manufacturers and foodservice organizations. Nikos will discuss how concepts first explored during his doctoral research within the MTSR community matured into operational, AI-powered applications that shape modern food-safety decision making.

Biography:

Nikos Manouselis (https://nikosmanouselis.com) is founder and CEO of Agroknow, the food safety intelligence company that uses AI to predict food risks and inform prevention. He is an Electronics & Computer Engineer that holds two MSc degrees, as well as a PhD on Agricultural Information Management. With more than 15 years of expertise in the intersection of data and technology for food and agriculture, he is frequently working with industry, academia and international organizations on ways in which state-of-art technologies may be used to help solve critical challenges in the food supply chain.