Mid-Year Meeting Portfolio Preview

Portfolio Update

Mid-Year Meeting Portfolio Preview

By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager

The Mid-Year Meeting is often a milestone for working groups to either release their deliverables or launch a new project. This year is no different: the agenda is loaded with sessions and activities that will ultimately help to simplify data exchange across the agriculture value chain.

Ag Lab Data | WG04 and WG11 are culminating with a new revision to the “v2” Modus codes. The team completed the soil list a while back and has made more enhancements and corrections that will be published at the Mid-Year Meeting. A first draft of a new Modus schema will also be shared for discussion, it is a large change from Modus 1, so we are looking for feedback from implementers, drop me a note if you are interested in sharing your thoughts. Next, the team will be pivoting to updating the plant/botanical methods list while finalizing the new schema.

Irrigation | The PAIL project also reached a significant milestone. After addressing some preliminary feedback from ISO on its original submission, the PAIL Team submitted parts 1, 2, and 3 for review as an ISO draft international standard. Over the next few months, the work will be translated and reviewed by the ISO technical committee with a final vote expected this fall. The group is now making a big push on promotion and engagement with organizations around the world to get everyone prepared to adopt the standard. If you deal with field observations and measurements data (i.e. from soil probes, weather stations, etc.), make irrigation recommendations, or need to create or ingest as-applied data from irrigation equipment, please let me know so we can set up a time to share the great work this team has done.

Traceability API | WG20 will present a detailed sequence diagram that goes along with the OpenAPI specification for linking data through the planting operation at the Mid-Year meeting. With a growing interest in knowing in detail “what happened where” in a field, this work is foundational to linking traditional supply chain data with field operations data. The API provides mechanisms to link data from the seed delivery document at the farm so the exact lot of seed that went into a planter can be easily documented. The team is now working on a presentation to accompany the paper they prepared for the International Conference on Precision Agriculture explaining the API, and identifying where additional innovation and opportunity exists within the industry.

Weather Data API | The WG23 team has been working to review existing standards to help inform the development of a standardized API. They plan to integrate GRIB2 codes from the World Meteorological Organization via the PAIL (ISO 7673-2) observations and measurements framework. This will leverage the existing controlled vocabulary for weather observations with additional detail about how the readings were derived.

Field Boundaries | This continues to be a hot topic in the industry. WG24 is wrapping up final touches on a formal recommendation to enhance the ADAPT Standard work after receiving feedback on initial concepts with the ADAPT team. The group is also seeking some additional feedback from autonomous vehicle companies and is incorporating feedback into a best practices guide for what data should be recorded during boundary definition to enable interoperability.

Dairy Feed Data | Documentation of use cases is nearly complete in the WG25 Dairy Feed Data working group. Now the team is going back through the use cases and developing key data element lists for the identified interfaces. These elements can then be used to gap check any existing standards that may be applicable or be used to develop new standards for exchanging data related to dairy feed.

Data Ethics and Stewardship | As AgGateway developed standards allowing data to flow more easily, data ethics and stewardship will become increasingly important. To address this issue, WG26 has broken down the various parts of AgGateway’s 2017 Data Privacy and Security Whitepaper and is working through each part to make improvements and changes based on what has changed in the last seven years. It has also identified some new areas to address among key emerging and evolving technologies such as autonomy and artificial intelligence. As these become more common in the agricultural industry, they create new concerns related to data use and access the group will address in the updated whitepaper.

Entity Identification | Last but not least, WG27 Entity Identification Rules has launched and issued a call to all AgGateway membership to document the various use cases for how grower entities are created and managed within databases like AGIIS. These use cases will be crucial in developing new rules to better manage the process, which will ensure fewer duplicates and create a better understanding of important business processes – for example, determining which entities involved in product deliveries are also party to a contract.

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@aggteway.org), or sign up for a working group here.