Q1 Outreach, Working Group Progress

Portfolio Update

Q1 Outreach and Portfolio Progress Report

By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager

In addition to the usual flurry of virtual Working Group and Committee meetings, February travel allowed AgGateway leadership, including yours truly, to focus on driving additional engagement and awareness of AgGateway working groups across the industry.

The month started with a visit to the International Production and Processing Expo (IPPE) in Atlanta to make contacts within the animal feed industry. The primary goal was to increase awareness of the upcoming Dairy Feed Data Standards Assessment working group that will be kicking off this month with several new-to-AgGateway participants.

Next was a trip to Arizona for the Open Industrial Digital Eco-System Summit to see how other industries are using tools like connectCenter to solve interoperability challenges. Finally, a visit to Commodity Classic ended the month providing multiple benefits – I was able to attend AEF’s Spring Plugfest, meet with multiple AEM teams in addition to promoting the various working groups with exhibitors and attendees at the show.

We were busy, but the extra travel time did nothing to slow efforts within the working groups – all were still making progress toward their deliverables throughout the month.

WG04, WG11 Modus Ag Lab Data is working on incorporating new soil health methods into the latest version of soil test methods as well as cleaning up a few missing values on existing methods. Also, a subset of the team is working through a first draft of the new schema being built within the connectCenter tool which enables reusing common components from the ADAPT Standard work.

WG12 PAIL presented the updated versions of the three parts of the standard to the ISO technical committee with resolutions to all the comments that were received as part of the ISO review process. The team also was updating example files and other documentation for submission for final review by ISO.

WG20 Traceability API continued to trim down the model they had developed to focus in on an MVP use case. When complete the API will enable traceability for the transfer events from the farms inventory to the planter and to the field.

WG23 Weather Data API documented first use cases and moved on to begin identifying the core data elements needed to create the API specification. They are working closely with the PAIL team to ensure alignment with Part 2 of the ISO 7673 standard for observations and measurements.

WG24 Field Boundary GNSS Accuracy has not met, but the work group leaders have been collecting feedback from various parties in the industry to clarify the gaps in how field boundaries are currently shared to zero in on where existing standards could be improved to better communicate field boundary information between systems.

WG25 Dairy Feed Data Standards Assessment has scheduled its inaugural meeting for 4 March from 11:00 – Noon Central time US. As announced a few weeks ago, the launch was delayed as several “new to AgGateway” organizations had requested more time to work through the process and assign participants. If you would like to participate sign up here or contact me with any questions.

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.