Regaining Momentum, Building Efficiency in Q3

Portfolio Update

Regaining Momentum, Building Efficiency in Q3

By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager

With the dust settling a little this month from all activity of the Mid-Year Meeting there are several advances from working groups that got back into their regular cadence. Things are also continuing to coalesce around some new efforts, so be on the lookout for your opportunity to participate. When we’re ready to launch, you’ll receive an email from me providing all the details you will need about the project, including registration.

One key development from the past month came from the WG00 Agrisemantics Working Group, which is nearing completion of a recommendation on policies and procedures needed to provide ongoing support for semantic resources created or managed by AgGateway. This deliverable will be passed along for consideration by the Digital Resource Center. It is intended to provide a framework for the organizational structure and processes needed to maintain the crop list the group is working on, and the Modus lab test codes. It will also be utilized by other semantic resources identified by working groups as well as the ADAPT project.

Speaking of Modus, WG04 Agricultural Lab Data in conjunction with WG11 LATAM Regional Soil Laboratory Data met and agreed that if version 2 of the Modus schema is going to be a breaking change, the team should “break it good”. Originally the groups were looking at making some more minor tweaks and adjustments moving the current XML to JSON. However, after further review it was decided the schema could be flattened and simplified, so the team is looking into a more substantial update to the schema. Anyone interested in how data is communicated regarding lab test data should join the group and get in on the discussions now to make sure your needs are covered.

After a brief pause, WG19 ADAPT Serialization is back at work finalizing details for the JSON portion of the serialization guideline. They are also looking into what additional guidelines may be needed for the planned use of GeoParquet for the higher density spatial data portion of the data set. Make sure to sign up for the working group and join the meetings if you have any thoughts or experience relating to the serialization tools.

Member bandwidth has been strained with so much energy going into ADAPT, which has slowed the progress of WG21 European Reporting Data ADAPT Mapping.. The effort to apply ADAPT to some European data reporting models still continues at a steady pace yielding insight into what data is needed by these reporting systems, and it identified some concepts and ideas that are being considered for the ADAPT standard work.

Related to the new working groups discussed in last month’s update, AgGateway staffers were able to meet with several current and prospective members and are building strong interest in the new efforts. We are refining scopes and securing commitments from companies to provide some needed expertise and plan to launch several of the new working groups in the coming month.

We are also planning to integrate some different work methods to improve our efficiency and reduce member time commitment to initiatives. In particular, we are planning to pilot a single, 2-3 hour long session to complete the deliverables, versus multiple one hour sessions over weeks. Do you think this is a good idea? I’d like to hear your thoughts on whether you think this is a feasible approach.

As usual if you have any questions on the activities of any of these working groups or want to get engaged feel free to contact me (ben.craker@aggteway.org), or sign up for a working group here.