Washington, D.C., February 6, 2018 – AgGateway’s ADAPT Framework, which is designed to make it easy for various hardware and software systems that growers use in their businesses to “talk to each other”, now has a new tool to help developers: the ADAPT ISO Plugin. AgGateway has released Version 2 of the ADAPT ISO Plugin, making it easier for Farm Management Information Systems (FMIS) to read and write data to/from displays and terminals that use the ISOXML specification.
“The release of the ISO Plugin is exciting, because it provides a standard that can either be adopted or used as a guide in developing other plugins,” said Mark Stelford, Chairman of AgGateway’s ADAPT Oversight Committee and General Manager of Premier Crop Systems. “Many systems can collect and analyze field operations data in production agriculture, but the global agricultural industry has struggled with the goal of making it easy for different systems to seamlessly communicate with one another when it comes to a shared data format,” he said. “This is the nut that ADAPT has been helping to crack.”
The ISO Plugin release was made possible by the work of several member companies involved in AgGateway, especially Topcon Agriculture. Other manufacturers are working on similar plugins for their displays/terminals; John Deere has already provided ADAPT-compatible plugins for licensing, allowing software systems to read and write data to/from John Deere displays and terminals by integrating the ADAPT framework.
ADAPT, which stands for Agricultural Data Application Programming Toolkit, is an open source project that was released to the industry in 2016. The Agricultural Retailers Association (ARA) and many major grower organizations, including the American Farm Bureau Federation, have encouraged manufacturers to implement ADAPT to help ag retailers, agronomists and growers better manage data and apply it to make improvements in their operations.
In order for ADAPT to be implemented, various manufacturers must develop plugins so that their proprietary products can interact with the framework. Several major original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and software companies with specialized services have made formal commitments to release plugins for many of their proprietary data formats.
One of the strengths of ADAPT is that a number of leading companies worked collaboratively through AgGateway to tackle the interoperability problem. The ADAPT solution allows each equipment manufacturer to keep its own proprietary software and technology in the cab and monitor, but also allows participating companies to “export to” and “import from” applications using a single integration with the ADAPT framework. This allows FMIS companies to program once and be able to receive data from all companies that provide ADAPT plugins, including other FMIS companies. It will also allow an FMIS to export a prescription to any monitor that is using ADAPT.
Equipment manufacturers and software companies are encouraged to go to www.ADAPTFramework.org for more information. More on AgGateway activities, including information on how to become involved, can be found at www.AgGateway.org.
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AgGateway is a non-profit organization dedicated to the expanded use of information to maximize efficiency and productivity, promoting and enabling the industry's transition to digital agriculture. www.AgGateway.org.
Contact:
Susan Ruland AgGateway +1 (202) 742-5967, ext. 10 susan.ruland@AgGateway.org