The extremely popular ADAPT Framework, with more than a half million downloads, inspired the development of a global industry standard that significantly improves its utility and capabilities.
ARLINGTON, VA [18 June, 2024] AgGateway is pleased to announce the release of ADAPT Standard version 1.0 (ADAPT Standard), another high-value tool in the ADAPT set of resources alongside the ADAPT Framework, ADAPT plugins, and the ADAPT Serialization Specification. It is freely available for download with a business-friendly license.
Developed over the past two years through the cooperative efforts of AgGateway member volunteers and built on nearly a decade of framework development, ADAPT Standard is the world’s first standard to support a broad range of farm data that is supported by farm management information systems.
AgGateway’ s ADAPT resources overall are widely used by the agriculture industry, with more than 500,000 downloads since its initial release in 2014. “The process of forming a standard was industry driven,” says Jim Wilson, AgGateway’s Chief Technology Officer. “The ADAPT Framework was so ubiquitous that it was being erroneously referred to as a standard. Conversations with AgGateway members and other stakeholders made it clear that advancing ADAPT as a standard would meet an increasingly pressing need.”
“The release of this ADAPT Standard is a big leap forward for ag data interoperability,” says Dan Danford, Global Precision Technology Partner Manager, CNH Industrial. “I believe it’s going to eliminate the need for countless hours and expenses now spent on data translations and software programming.”
“It took more than seven years for dozens of AgGateway member companies to collaborate, establish and agree upon the common ADAPT data model,” he continues. “It’s been very exciting to follow that continued collaboration over the past couple of years as this new data standard was developed through committee meetings and workshops. Because CNH is highly focused on connecting its customers with the partners they demand, this is going to be a particularly valuable tool for us.”
“This standard release is a win-win,” says Andrew MacDonell, Senior Product Manager, Digital Agriculture, Topcon Positioning. “For Topcon, it streamlines integration and interoperability. For the industry, it fosters data consistency and accelerates digital adoption.”
“To ensure interoperability, SMAG has been building its data exchanges via API based on the AgGateway ADAPT Framework since 2018,” says Gilles Begue, Data and Cloud Project Manager, SMAG, Montpellier, France. “The open-source orientation of ADAPT, the high quality of the contributing companies – all of which are top-tier in our sector – and the first-class data model design convinced us that choosing ADAPT would offer SMAG a tremendous accelerator for the technical realization of our API platform.”
“AGCO welcomes the release of ADAPT Standard,” says Adrian Hackfort, Director, Product Management Onboard Electronics. “Next to established data standards like ISOXML and ISOBUS, this will become another essential building block for better data exchange in agriculture. ADAPT Standard will introduce further data sets which can be also transferred via the upcoming AEF Interoperability Network AgIN, and therefore foster synergies between AEF and AgGateway.”
AgGateway will continue to support the ADAPT Framework, its wildly successful open-source tool for transforming various field operations data formats. AgGateway is investing in development of an ADAPT Plugin to support ADAPT Standard, giving those who have invested in implementing the ADAPT Framework a smooth path for ADAPT Standard adoption.
“This milestone achievement is just the beginning of the next chapter in farm data interoperability, and we thank the ADAPT Committee members for their dedication of time, talent, and expertise to bring ADAPT Standard to the agriculture industry,” says Wilson. “We also thank the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and OAGi for their support of innovative model development tooling and best practices.”
ADAPT Standard Advantages
ADAPT Standard delivers several advantages to users over the data model used in the ADAPT Framework, including the following:
Simplified Data Model | The data model used in the ADAPT Framework is a superset of objects created by merging models from stakeholders across the ag industry. Some of these objects were never used in real-world data exchange and as a result are not included in this initial version of ADAPT Standard. Additionally, ADAPT Standard simplifies how equipment modeling and spatial data is handled. It is now the data producer’s responsibility to apply all necessary equipment offsets to the GPS positions and render all collected spatial data as polygon coverages with their associated logged variables. This approach improves data consistency and quality, leverages the expertise of the data producer (often the OEM) in doing the spatial manipulation, and lowers domain knowledge-associated barriers to entry for the data consumer.
Embraces Open Formats | ADAPT Standard is developed and maintained in connectCenter, which is an open-source tool developed by NIST and OAGi for managing the lifecycle of a standard. It allows AgGateway to easily release the model as a JSON Schema, and/or other formats as desired. ADAPT Standard uses open formats such as GeoParquet for expressing vector data and GeoTIFF for expressing raster data. It also uses WKT for geometries expressed as part of the JSON (e.g. field boundaries, guidance lines), addressing one of the biggest pain points of the ADAPT Framework – a lack of alternate programming language support – since most modern languages have libraries available to deal with these formats.
Delivers Semantic Interoperability | Just as open formats give us syntactic interoperability, we have also maintained the semantic interoperability offered by the ADAPT Framework. Included with ADAPT Standard are JSON files containing the controlled vocabularies required for use by the ADAPT Standard. This enables both producer and consumer to be completely clear on the meaning of data by expressing it in terms of ADAPT’s data type definition and unit systems.
Optimized for Consumption | The relationship between data producers and consumers is quite different than in the formative years of the ADAPT Framework. Producers generally focused on collecting data from their system as fast and efficiently as possible, forcing data consumers to find ways to interpret proprietary formatted data using producer-supplied libraries. The industry has since recognized the need to provide easier ways to consume this data, as evidenced by many OEMs providing Shapefile and GeoJSON representations. ADAPT Standard capitalizes on this shift by providing a uniform syntactic and semantic solution for expressing data in a consumption-optimized form.
AgGateway is a global, non-profit organization with the mission to develop the resources and relationships that drive digital connectivity in global agriculture and related industries. Learn more at www.aggateway.org.
Contact:
Paul Schrimpf Director of Marketing and Communications
+1 (202) 742-5967 x21 Cell: +1 440-227-7840 paul.schrimpf@AgGateway.org