Post-Conference Portfolio Update

Post-Conference Portfolio Update

By Ben Craker, AgGateway Portfolio Manager

Getting together in person in Florida last month certainly brought out the best in our work. We had a great series of sessions at the Annual Conference in Clearwater, and the sentiment from everyone present was that it was great to put aside Zoom and GoTo and get back together again.

Nearly every Working Group and Subcommittee had a session at the conference. Most sessions consisted of a quick update on status and progress made over the year for anyone in the audience that had not been directly involved, then quickly jumped in to work on the deliverables. If you are interested in reviewing any of the slides, including the overall update on the complete portfolio of working groups, they will all be posted to the wiki. A few highlights from the busy week include:

ADAPT: The ADAPT team had a couple of sessions looking at the future of the effort. The team is close to starting up a new working group that will take ADAPT to the next step, moving from the current machine centric task file-based architecture to a web enabled field focused approach. These changes are a direct result of industry requests to have a more web friendly way to share data among cloud platforms. During the Monday morning workshop, the groups discussed requirements and options and zeroed in on the scope for the first working group to address this next phase in ADAPT. Be on the lookout for a call for participation in the near future.

Modus on the Move: Agriculture Lab Data Working Groups WG04 – (North America) and WG11 (Latin America) showed the new version 2.0 of the Modus lab test codes for the first time at the annual conference. The team is finalizing the public facing tools and will be redirecting the ModusStandard.org domain to support the new lab test standards. And they are reaching out to key companies to begin implementation efforts of the improved and backwards compatible test data reporting structure. We also had a presentation from the Purdue OATS Center and OpenTEAM to share their recently built tools that help share soil test data using the Modus standard. The presentation was originally made as part of a Farm Foundation event focused on Fixing the Soil Health Tech Stack.

The Field Boundary: Definitions & Use Cases Working Group (WG17) had great discussions and determined a path forward that will address the various aspects of a field boundary. The end result will be a structure that allows sharing field information with multiple stakeholders. Scheduling of an in-person follow up meeting is already in the works to help move the industry forward in this critical area. The team is working on wrapping up documentation of the last few use cases and will move to identifying the key data elements associated with the concept of a field based on those user stories.

The Agrisemantics Group also made important progress in identifying some first steps to create new semantic infrastructure to ensure when data is shared, a common meaning will also be communicated between parties. The team is planning to create a proof of concept (PoC) for how to share and map between crop lists. Members also identified a need to more clearly document the process for long term maintenance of semantic resources within AgGateway based on what will be delivered in the proof of concept. To better document and formalize the process a task force will be created within the Digital Resource Center that will run in parallel to the infrastructure PoC WG00.

The Data Linking and Product Catalog groups also met but were more focused on reviewing the digital resources that have been delivered by recently sunset Working Groups, including In-Field Product ID Seeding Pilot and ADAPT Plug-in (WG01 and WG08) that delivered the ShippedItemInstance message, Product Catalog (WG03), and Linked Data (WG09) that created the Dataset Metadata structure to enable better communication between clouds. The group will create resources that will help AgGateway members better understand what tools and standards are available and ready for implementation.

If your organization could benefit from more efficient, standardized data exchange in the areas of Product Catalog, seed shipments to farmers, or grain traceability please don’t hesitate to contact Member.Services@aggateway.org or me directly at the Portfolio Management Center (ben.craker@aggateway.org), We would be glad to setup a review so you can begin planning how to incorporate these tools into future development and connections to trading partners.

Thanks for everyone that came to Florida and participated in a very successful annual meeting, and I look forward to what we will accomplish in the coming year.