Working Groups to Mark Progress at Mid-Year Meeting

Portfolio Update

Working Groups to Mark Progress at Mid-Year Meeting

By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager

Crunch time is upon us in the Portfolio Management Center, as many working groups set the Mid-Year Meeting as a target completion date for the resources they are developing. The goal is to get the work done and be able to show it to the broader AgGateway community during the conference. Altoona is only two weeks away, so teams are dotting I’s and crossing T’s to make sure everything is ready for the spotlight. There are a couple working groups also teeing up some larger topics that were unearthed that need face-to-face discussion as well.

All in all, it will be a busy week with a lot of material to review at Prairie Meadows. Here is a rundown of working group activities and progress:

WG00 Agrisemantics will have a demo of the proof-of-concept infrastructure to provide and maintain controlled vocabularies, variable-type registries, and other similar resources for the industry. The group will then seek input on the best path forward with regard to the crop list model. Through the discussions in the working group, we arrived at a crossroad regarding the correct level of granularity to incorporate in the crop model to enable mapping between the various crop lists in use throughout the industry. Each option has pros and cons so the team would like to get feedback on the best path forward.

WG04 Ag Lab Data is working to have version 2 of the Modus schema complete for review at the Mid-Year Meeting. The team has completed the transition of list of soil methods to the new more detailed structure in v2 and wanted to have both the soil list and schema ready for implementation. Also, the group has made significant progress moving the botanical list to v2, and has gotten a good start on the manure method list. This will be an exciting session for anyone that routinely deals with the results of laboratory tests.

WG15 Scale Ticket is making the final tweaks to the Open API specification meant to replace the paper scale ticket commonly used for truck shipment of bulk products or commodities to and from the farm. The team is excited to review the output at the meeting and has identified several potential follow-on efforts to discuss with the broader community.

WG17 Field Boundaries has arrived at agreed definitions for both a field and field boundary. They have also developed categories of field boundaries and identified the key data elements needed to exchange field and field boundaries between systems. They will review these terms, definitions, and use cases the materials were based on and are eager to get feedback from the industry on this first step toward resolving one of the stickiest interoperability issues in the industry.

The ADAPT session will also be one not to miss. There has been a lot of activity on the standardization effort which ties closely to the serialization working group. Additionally, the new WG21 project mapping ADAPT against several European data models already has some initial feedback from the first review of ADAPT and the EDI-Crop model.

Finally, the Data Linking Steering Committee will be involved in several sessions at the meeting. WG20 Traceability API plans to have a first draft of the specification for linking together various systems and events based on the Traceable Resource Unit (TRU) and Critical Tracking Event (CTE) concepts. The group is also planning to lead a discussion during the Allied Providers session to discuss some of the recent digital resources that have been developed and discuss what is needed to drive implementation. 

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.