Portfolio Milestones and Momentum in the Spotlight at Conference

Portfolio Update

Portfolio Milestones and Momentum in the Spotlight at Conference

By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager

The Annual Conference is shaping up to be another jam-packed in-person event. We have a full slate of working sessions, meetups on new topics, and report-outs from working groups that have completed their digital resources along with learning sessions and talks from industry experts. If you haven’t had a chance to scope out the full agenda, here are some highlights that we expect will be of significant interest to many in attendance.

ADAPT, The Standard. The Annual Conference will mark a significant milestone for ADAPT. The open-source team plans to have Version 1 of the new ADAPT Standard ready for review. Tied to that will be the output of WG19 that made the recommendation on how to serialize the data from the new platform-agnostic model. Next, ADAPT will evolve to help move the framework from the original “machine and data card” centric view of data exchange to a “field focused” view, built to enable cloud-to-cloud communication.

Animal Ag in the Spotlight. I spent some time last month visiting the World Dairy Expo to discuss with several stakeholders in attendance a potential new working group on exchanging dairy feed data used to mix rations. I’m pleased to report that there was a lot of good feedback and interest. We are working to align this effort with other projects in the industry like ICAR’s Animal Data Exchange opensource standard. We are planning to have all the pieces in place to kick this effort off at the Annual Meeting, with the initial scope focused on documenting use cases and data needs to help direct future efforts.

Field Boundaries in Focus. We recently sent out a call to participate for the new WG24 Field Boundaries: GNSS Accuracy. This working group will be taking some of the first steps to get up and running with a session at the Annual Conference. Building off the preliminary work of the last field boundary terms and definitions group, the next step will focus on guidelines for what data is needed about how a boundary is defined to better understand its accuracy.

The Traceability API. WG20 is on pace to have a v1 of their deliverable to review at the Conference. This first API specification will cover data exchange related to the Traceable Resource Units (TRU) and Critical Tracking Events (CTE) needed to enable linking different events from system to system during the planting process. This will ultimately provide the traceability needed to know what seed was planted in which location. This will build off previous efforts like the In-Field Product ID work.

Modus Movement. Another group planning to have a big deliverable ready to announce is WG04 and WG11 working on the Modus lab data standard. The group had previously completed a “v2” of the Modus soil test methods list and has continued to refine that work. There will be a significant update to that list which will improve useability and further clarify some of the test methods. Additionally, the team is hard at work on a v2 Modus schema. The goal is to simplify the existing 3-part XML schema to a single message that is also available in JSON to help drive adoption and improve data exchange with labs.

WG00 Agrisemantics. This team will have the crop definition model ready for review, complete with a proof-of-concept API featuring some examples encoded. This work will form the basis not only to provide an industry tool to map different crop lists between each other, but also serve as the example for future AgGateway-managed controlled vocabularies.

Of course, that’s not all that will be happening in Nashville. We will have meetings for the Weather and Forecast Data API group, the PAIL Irrigation and Observations and Measurements standard, a meetup on standardizing settlement sheets building off the Scale Ticket work, and many other formal sessions. Of course, there are also plenty of breaks, meals, and receptions that will foster some great networking.

I look forward to catching up with everyone in person. 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.