Reviewing First Quarter Priorities

Portfolio Update

Reviewing First Quarter Priorities

By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager

It may not come as a surprise to most of you, but January is not customarily a month of great productivity for AgGateway working groups. With everyone coming back from holiday break, working on wrapping up year end, or getting focused on new year priorities, AgGateway volunteer working sessions tend to slide a bit on the priority list.

But as the dust settles and people get back into the grove for the new year, things are starting to pick up again.

The biggest movement by far has come from the Entity ID working group, which generated enormous interest and participation in next week’s in-person meeting in North Carolina. The staff is hard at work preparing materials to make sure the time together is as productive as possible. This is clearly a huge issue facing the industry and the time is right to collaboratively develop a solution that meets everyone’s needs for this multi-faceted issue.

The PAIL Team is continuing to address comments received through the ISO process. In the next few weeks, they will submit the final revision for publication as an international standard. This is an exciting culmination of nearly 10 years of work that will have wide reaching impacts across the agricultural data space.

After several months of writing and revising its White Paper, the Data Ethics group is making its final edits and additions. They incorporated some of the topics discussed during the panel session at the Annual Meeting and are working to ensure all the different sections flow well together. This document is shaping up to be an excellent resource for anyone that is developing or managing a software system. It provides guidance on the topics that need to be considered and addressed for ethical data management. And unlike other similar efforts, this work is not just focused on the grower. The topics are intended to apply to any person or organization that produces data and the downstream systems consuming that data.

Modus Plant Tissue Methods is working through the list and updating it with citations and other details. The team is also documenting other metadata requirements that are important to plant tissue tests that were not discussed in as much detail in the soil or manure working groups. The output will lead to some new requirements for a Modus schema update in the future.

The Dealer Lookup team has a first draft of the new message they are reviewing. After a little more fine tuning their work should be just about wrapped up. This will be a big help moving inventory among dealers once implemented.

Similarly, the Field Boundary GNSS group has a proposal for a final data model they are doing one last pass through. Once that is complete the proposed model for a high-fidelity field boundary with all the definitions for each element will be posted as a new issue for the ADAPT Standard community to review ahead of likely incorporation into ADAPT Standard.

Finally, I mentioned in the last newsletter that we have several new working groups that are poised to kick off. Once a couple of the teams above wrap up, we will be sending out calls for participation, so we don’t have too many projects going on at one time.

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.