Summer Outreach and Near-Term Initiatives

Portfolio Update

Summer Outreach and Near-Term Initiatives

By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager

I got to attend Tech Hub Live in Des Moines last week, where I served on a panel to discuss progress in standardization over the last year. This was a great opportunity to share everything AgGateway has achieved both directly through the efforts of our working groups as well as in collaboration with other organizations to impact data interoperability.

However, the work is not done, and part of the purpose of going to events is to drive awareness and encourage implementation. Without broad industry implementation of the standards and other tools we’ve developed, our discussions will not result in end users seeing any change.

If you are wondering where to start give me a call. I would be glad to walk through all the available resources. Making sure product managers have an understanding of what exists can help them develop better requirements and ensure the capabilities and features in your systems are setup for success as more and more interfaces between systems are required.

Current Work Summary

The Modus team is completing some final tweaks on the new v2 manure methods list. This is in the queue to be approved at the next Agrisemantics Committee meeting along with the latest updates and additions to the soil method list. Be on the lookout for a new call to participate for a botanical/plant tissue method focused working group.

At the same time, the Modus schema team has transitioned over to joining the Wednesday ADAPT Standard calls. With the release of v1 of the ADAPT Standard at the Mid-Year Meeting, that group is now transitioning to adding observations and measurements to the ADAPT model. Lab test data fits squarely as an observation and measurement, so the work streams were combined to determine if Modus can flow through the ADAPT Standard, or at a minimum be aligned and share common components. If you are interested at all in the Modus schema or sharing observations and measurements data like soil samples, weather data, and crop scouting information, be sure to contact member.services@aggateway.org and ask to be added to the ADAPT Standard calls and follow the GitHub issue board here.

After some great discussions at the Mid-Year Meeting, the Entity ID working group is scheduling a series of virtual meetings as well as planning an in-person meeting to help work through this topic. How grower entities and created and updated in tools like AGIIS is of increasing importance and can cause real headaches trying to sort through duplicates. Establishing some clearer rules and best practices will be a highly anticipated output from this group.

Along the same lines as the Modus schema work, the Weather Data API team is also contributing to the Observations and Measurements discussions on the ADAPT Standard calls. Similar to lab test data, weather data is another prime example of observation and measurement information so the team again wants to see if it makes sense to include weather data in ADAPT, or at a minimum there will be components to reuse to ensure alignment among the different resources. The team is still meeting to work on cleaning up use cases, documenting data requirements and identifying controlled vocabularies that will be leveraged by the API.

The Dairy Feed Data team is closing in on wrapping up the project, though it is taking a little longer than first anticipated. The last couple use cases identified are being reviewed and they are shifting to making sure all the different data elements required in each interface between systems identified in the use cases are documented. Having this documentation will be imperative for the next step of either confirming any existing standards cover the use cases, or as a basis to create a new standard if nothing exists.

The Data Ethics team is reviewing the OpenTEAM Ag Data Use Documents. The working group is documenting any areas that are unclear or that may be issues for member companies to support with the plan to review and propose tweaks working with OpenTEAM. Once the group has shared feedback they hope to circulate among AgGateway members for broader review. With the expectation the revised documents can serve as a best practice type guide for data ethics across the industry.

There are a couple other meetings we are getting scheduled as well now that staff travel is slowing down a little, so be on the lookout for those calls to participate and meetup invitations to help inform what topics AgGateway tackles next.

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.