Progress Marches on Across Working Groups

Portfolio Update

Progress Marches on Across Working Groups

By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager

Several of the working groups are doing their best imitation of a “Midwestern goodbye.” They seem like they are done and ready to move on, but then there is just one more thing to address. While this is maybe frustrating to the teams trying to declare victory and move to the next topic, I think the input and questions being uncovered are a sign that more and more people are interested in what we are doing and contributing to improve the various deliverables.

WG12 PAIL The PAIL team’s work to shepherd ISO 7673 through the Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) review is currently on pause while it is out for the final ballot. Still, a lot of work remains. Many of the concepts in part 2 of the standard have implications on other projects like ADAPT, weather data API, and Modus. As a result, the team is working on putting together examples, guides, and other resources to help show how the pieces fit together and drive adoption in the industry.

WG23 Weather data API progress has been slow, but the team has been steadily uncovering existing resources, standards, and controlled vocabularies to help inform the API development. Having an API specification that can leverage other existing standards will be a big help in defining something the industry will implement. It will also eliminate the need to develop new semantic resources for many weather data related topics.

WG24 Field Boundary posted their High-Fidelity boundary proposal as an issue for the ADAPT Standard community to review. If you haven’t already done so, please take a look and add your thoughts or questions to help refine the proposal to address the issues around exchanging field boundaries.

WG25 Dairy Feed Data is wrapping up an initial model and definitions of the associated elements for the data involved in creating and feeding a dairy ration. This work will serve as a strong foundation for future work in the area.

WG26 Data Ethics had what it thought was a final draft ready to share with the broader membership for comment and review. But the final review turned up a few more topics to address, and other minor issues to tweak before it is ready to leave the working group. The draft is nearly done so be on the lookout for a call for AgGateway membership to review and comment prior to publishing the paper to the entire industry.

WG28 Modus Plant Tissue is making great progress, thanks in large part to the work of a couple of experts in lab testing. They are refining the method list and organizing the references into a very high-quality resource that will improve data exchange in the industry for plant tissue testing.

So, while progress is not as fast as we would like, these teams are still moving steadily forward. Oh, and don’t forget we are only a couple months away from the North American Mid-Year Meeting where many of these teams will be presenting their completed works and discussing what comes next.

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.