Setting the Table for Mid-Year Meeting

Portfolio Update

Setting the Table for Mid-Year Meeting

By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager

With Spring officially in the air, newly started working groups are getting their footing while other efforts are beginning to wrap things up. All eyes are on our next milepost – the June Mid-Year meeting – when we will get together in person and review what progress has been made and what new areas need to be addressed.

The Modus team continues to make steady progress. They are tracking down some additional information to add a few new methods to the soil list requested by the Soil Health Institute, which has been contributing its perspective. The team has also divided up some work based on areas of expertise – there is a subgroup that’s been assigned to work on updating the manure methods list to the Modus v2 structure and level of detail. And a separate group has broken down the schema into different topics – they are holding a series of meetings to align on requirements for the Modus v2 structure to hopefully support the needs of several international lab data exchange systems.

The PAIL team continues to put the final touches on parts 1, 2, and 3 of the ISO 7673 committee draft. They are also doing a lot of outreach to reengage with past PAIL participants to ensure their organizations are up to speed and ready to implement when the standard is released from the ISO committee. This also includes outreach with other AgGateway working groups to make sure that current work is in line with the concepts in the draft international standard.

The Traceability API team is finishing up with plans to hand over their initial API specification at the next Standards and Guidelines meeting. They have also been discussing options for future traceability related work, particularly on working with the ADAPT Standard team to ensure support for traceability within the new ADAPT model.

The Weather and Forecast Data API group reviewed the PAIL ISO 7673-2 observations and measurements specification and is now working on defining how the API can be an implementation of that model for weather and forecast data.

The Field boundary: GNSS Accuracy group started meeting again reviewing the feedback that was collected from a variety of different stakeholders. The team had reached out to a variety of different experts and practitioners to help document the gaps in what metadata is generally available with a field boundary to inform their work. The goal being to have some specific recommendation on what could be logged that might exist within a system today but is simply not recorded as well as possibly making recommendations to other standards to capture information that would be useful but is not available.

The Dairy Feed Data working group spent the first few meetings agreeing to a little more detail on the scope the group will consider, ensuring that they keep the work manageable within the target timeline but also cover the important topics. They are now working on documenting use cases and data requirements to establish a baseline for future review of existing standards or to inform development of new digital resources.

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