Working Group Progress Report Ahead of Altoona Meeting

Portfolio Update

Working Group Progress Report Ahead of Altoona Meeting

By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager

All eyes are turning to the Mid-Year Meeting, as working groups push to get things ready for the opportunity to meet and discuss in person. Several groups will have deliverables wrapped up and ready for release and promotion in Altoona. We will also be kicking off some new efforts just in time to capitalize on the benefit of engaging in face-to-face discussions.

The Modus Team (WG04) is on track to have a version 2 manure methods list ready for release, thanks in big part to contributions from Randall Warden at A&L Great Lakes Labs and Nancy Bohl Borman at the University of Minnesota. Considerable progress has been made on the version 2 schema. WG11, the Latin America-based soil test data working group, also met face-to-face in April to review progress to date and provided feedback and updates to ensure the work is applicable to the Latin American market.

For those interested in irrigation data, the PAIL Team (WG02) is starting to shift to promotion and engagement while they are wrapping up the final submission of ISO7673 for review as a draft international standard. There is also some cross-pollination happening with the Weather Data API (WG23) working group basing their work on the ISO7673-2 observations and measurements framework to define the API. That team also circulated a questionnaire (Available here, please provide your input if you provide/consume weather data) to the industry to get some more feedback on how current weather data APIs in the industry are being used and what future capabilities are expected. They are using this information to help make sure all the right requirements are being considered during API development. 

Field Boundaries (WG24) also reconvened with an extended virtual meeting to work through the responses received on their questionnaire regarding field boundary positioning accuracy. The feedback is being used to guide next steps and identify what implementation guidelines or changes to existing standards will be developed to help address the complexities of accurately exchanging positioning data from one system to another.

Members of the Dairy Feed Data (WG25) working group have been taking time outside the regular meeting to document use cases. The team then reviews each use case to ensure the documentation is clear and the various perspectives are covered. These use cases will then serve as the basis for documenting what data is needed and where throughout the dairy feeding process. These data requirements can then be used to gap check existing standards or create something new if nothing existing is applicable.

We are also spinning up a couple of new working groups. We issued a call to participate in a Data Ethics and Stewardship (WG26) working group in mid-April. The main purpose of this effort is to update the data privacy white paper, but to also identify if there are any related topics membership would like AgGateway to work on.

We are also getting an Entity Identification Rules (WG27) working group organized with the plan to have one or two virtual meetings preceding an in-person working session during the Mid-Year Meeting. The outcome will be a recommendation to the Directory Oversight Committee on how to better manage entities within AGIIS. The result should be a clear understanding of which entity is matched with which GLN, ensuring that all trading partners are on the same page when exchanging information about different farm entities and locations.

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.