Working Groups Active at Annual Meeting

Portfolio Update

Working Groups Active at Annual Meeting

By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager

In accordance with last month’s prophecy in this editorial space, the North America Annual Meeting and Conference in Austin was a flurry of Working Group related activity. In addition to the great networking and warm weather there were some significant decisions made, and action plans laid out on a variety of topics.

Modus had several updates approved and integrated into the GitHub repo. Several of these additions improved documentation, which will make it easier for users to understand what changes and additions are made as method lists are added and updated in the repository.

The Weather Data API team agreed to pivot direction a little, focusing on more of a “strawman” API definition instead of trying to come out with a full-fledged standard API right away. The idea is to get something for the broader industry to react to, based on the needs of the weather data consumers that predominately make up the working group. The team agreed to put in a few more months of work to develop this API definition, then refine and iterate based on feedback.

Similarly, the Field Boundaries team chose to focus on additional front-end work. The goal is still to propose an addition to ADAPT to cover the “High Fidelity” Field Boundary concept, but at the meeting it was evident there needs to be clear explanations of when and where this boundary would be used – and that it should start as more of a best practices guide for boundary definition and not a standard. The team is working with the ADAPT Standard leaders to figure out the pathway to make the proposed changes. The scope of the addition to ADAPT is more than what can reasonably fit in and be discussed in a single GitHub issue as was originally planned.

The Dairy Feed Data team will also be active for a little longer as they do some final cleanup to document data requirements. The group is also working to coordinate with other groups outside AgGateway working on data interoperability issues related to dairy feed data in different parts of the world. Once there is additional clarity on how those groups are planning to proceed, a decision will be made on what new AgGateway working group(s) would be needed.

Data Ethics had a great panel discussion that highlighted the importance of the updated white paper. The discussion also drew out some additional perspectives and topics the team is working on to ensure they are adequately covered in the paper. They plan to review the latest comments and edits and get a clean copy out for broader membership review this year.

Entity ID was one of the most attended sessions at the conference. The group agreed on some of the core assumptions and perspectives and is working to prepare for a subsequent face-to-face meeting in February 2025. The team is working to unpack all the different requirements regarding what needs to be identified about an entity, and why, for the various stakeholders. This alignment will serve as the basis for understanding what changes need to be made to the current system and what business rules need to be put in place.

Several of the meetups held during the conference are also leading to Calls to Participate that will be hitting your inbox in the next month or so, including:

  • There was general agreement to kick off a Harmonized Contract working group, but with the twist that interest is being driven more by the need for different expressions like JSON or REST API’s instead of the traditional XML messages.
  • The PICS meetup determined a gap review of the PICS Specification against the STAC specification would make sense for a working group to explore.
  • The Mix Ticket meetup had a good discussion on the current state of the Dispensing messages, identified some gaps that it does not cover, and agreed that having a standardized interface – especially as many mixer/blender manufacturers are moving to JSON interfaces – would be welcome. The group also agreed that the scope would cover crop nutrition and crop protection, leaving feed out of scope for this project.

There were numerous other conversations in the hallways and during networking receptions covering a wide variety of topics. While great progress is being made by AgGateway to develop valuable digital resources there are still a lot of opportunities for companies to implement the digital resources already developed. Data exchange is now table stakes and needs to be robust and efficient as well as scalable among numerous trading partners. It was also apparent we need to start focusing more on how we connect the supply chain messaging standards with field operations data to generate additional insights for all parties as well as ensure accurate and reliable data is collected across the whole value chain.

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.