Taking Steps Toward a Standard: Join the Effort

ADAPT

Taking Steps Toward a Standard: Join the Effort

By Jim Wilson, AgGateway Chief Technology Officer

Over the past few months, we have been sharing with the agriculture industry AgGateway’s commitment to taking bold, next-level steps with ADAPT. Work on ADAPT began in 2012 and has brought significant benefit to AgGateway’s members and the broader agriculture industry for the many years since the release of version 1, as evidenced by the more than a quarter million downloads it has delivered to subscribers over the past decade.

At ADAPT’s core is the ADAPT Data Model. Industry experts have often referred to the ADAPT Data Model as a “standard,” but it is not. In recent years, industry stakeholders — without diminishing the existing value of ADAPT— have spoken with clear consensus that taking the best parts of the ADAPT Data Model as a starting point for a fresh standardization effort would be invaluable to the agriculture industry.

To that end, AgGateway and our members have invested in ADAPT Standard development, and anyone in the world is welcome to participate in that effort, AgGateway member or not. We are making excellent progress so far – for example, we have already produced a work-in-progress JSON schema – and we look forward to sharing with the industry a set of deliverables and target completion dates in the March newsletter.

Additionally, the industry requires a carefully designed method of serializing ADAPT-Standard-conformant data that balances myriad competing requirements across several use cases. (Serialization is the process of expressing data in computer memory to a form that can be stored or communicated to another system.) To that end, AgGateway is launching an ADAPT Serialization Working Group. AgGateway members are welcome to join WG19.

From lobbying organizations like the World Economic Forum, to professional associations like the IEEE, to high-profile agriculture conferences like the Precision Ag VISION conference, the global outcry for agriculture-industry standards is being met by AgGateway, its members, and its collaborative partners today! We welcome everyone to get involved!