Reviewing First Quarter Priorities

Portfolio Update

Reviewing First Quarter Priorities

By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager

While many of us have been living in a deep freeze for the past month, the activity level has been warming up for many AgGateway working groups. Most teams have had a couple of meetings since the holiday break and are back up to speed. Several groups are looking at the finish line, which also means we are starting to look at the Mid-Year meeting and what new activities will benefit from some face-to-face time.

Members of the PAIL team submitted the final round of edits to ISO. Those changes will now be reviewed and incorporated with the new international standard planned for official release by ISO later this year. Be on the lookout for announcements when ISO 7673 Agricultural Field Operations Data Part 1: Core Concepts, Part 2: Observations and Measurements, and Part3: Irrigation Operations are published.

The Weather and Forecast API team completed a bit of a reset, going back to the charter and trimming back on some scope creep that had worked its way into the project. They are focusing on making sure the foundational use cases and other documentation are complete and accurate to help guide a more focused minimum viable product (MVP) scope for the API definition.

Field Boundary has a draft data model for the “High Fidelity” field boundary that is being aligned with some other work and will be posted as an issue on the ADAPT Standard GitHub repository. Why is this big news? The data model is the first step in being able to exchange field boundaries with sufficient metadata so the recipient knows when and how it was created and at what GNSS accuracy level. This will be a significant step forward as more and more field operations require accurate boundaries.

The Data Ethics team is dotting the last i’s and crossing the final t’s on the new whitepaper. Be on the lookout for announcements that offer you the opportunity to review the document and provide feedback. The team wants to hear what AgGateway membership thinks about the paper prior to releasing it to the broader industry. If you were not part of the working group that drafted the paper, this is a great opportunity to voice your opinion.

You probably already saw a Directors Download from Jeremy as well as other buzz about the Entity ID meeting. The group was able to lay all the cards on the table during the face-to-face meeting. It was great to see the different companies and segments involved sharing their perspectives, definitions, and understanding of the issue. The meeting helped align the group on what the issues are and how different organizations see the issue. This common understanding will be instrumental in arriving at a solution that works for the whole industry. The team has a series of calls scheduled, and a lot of offline work lined up as well. When the Mid-Year Meeting comes along, it will be exciting to hear about the group’s progress on this long-standing issue.

The Modus plant tissue/botanical team is continuing at a slow and steady pace, pecking away at the list of test methods. Pulling together all the citations and related information takes time, but the quality of the resource being put together will be invaluable – the need to exchange rich data between labs and other systems will only increase in coming years.

Finally, the Dealer Lookup group finalized a new message that will be reviewed at the next Standards and Guidelines meeting. The timing of the holidays slowed the group down a little, but they were able to review the issue and develop a solution in only a few meetings. This again shows how AgGateway processes – and some of the tools we are starting to leverage more frequently – can help quickly resolve data exchange headaches.

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.