AgGateway Product Catalog Team Prepares for Next Steps

Photo credit: GROWMARK

Product Catalog

AgGateway Product Catalog Team Prepares for Next Steps

By Brent Kemp, AgGateway Executive VP and North America Steering Committee Director

The AgGateway Product Catalog Working Group presented a webinar in February to interested members, sharing the work completed on a proof-of-concept (POC) catalog message and soliciting additional participation in reviewing the message content. The Working Group has been active since 2019 in developing and piloting a message for use in crop protection eCommerce catalogs.

Mike Altman (Syngenta) and Scott Nieman (Land O'Lakes) walked attendees through the development of the initial catalog message, highlighting the new tool sets used to define the message from the OAGIS specification. Notable in the development of the POC is the quick timeline: from start of coding to finish with the POC was just 10 weeks. This is a success for the changes in Working Group process AgGateway began implementing last year.

Scott shared an online live demonstration of an API that signed into a Syngenta service, requested product information, and pulled and loaded the requested data.

At the conclusion of the overview and demonstration, attendees were asked to participate in a schema review to identify any gaps in the message data element structure. Considerations such as implementation for new product lines and additional use cases are in scope, but the goal for moving the current crop protection-oriented schema to production is early June 2020. Several attendees agreed to participate; follow-up meetings for the review are being scheduled for March. Land O'Lakes is also providing the DDL for staging databases that can be used by testers to stand up their own versions of the API and message.

Several associated working groups may spin out of the feedback we've received. Look for announcements in the weeks to come. Thanks to Syngenta and Land O'Lakes for a great presentation and for sharing the work done to date. Please see the AgGateway wiki for more information on the work of the Product Catalog Working Group, or contact Member Services at Member.Services@AgGateway.org.