Setting Priorities for Clearwater

Portfolio Update

Setting Priorities for Clearwater

By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager

It’s that time of year again! We are rapidly approaching the Annual Meeting and Conference where there will again be a flurry of activity, with some working groups wrapping up and others kicking off.

The agenda is a little different this year with not quite as many working sessions or meetups and more focus on education. Though the schedule has changed there is still a lot going on within the PMC to move the needle on efficient data exchange in the agricultural industry.

The PAIL team is working on making a few updates to the proposed ISO 7673 series of standards. After passing several committee ballots and subsequent feedback from the ISO management group, the standard was withdrawn to incorporate some information that was originally planned to be added in the first revision.

Of particular relevance to AgGateway is 7673-2 Observations and Measurements. Much of that standard is dependent on controlled vocabularies to ensure accurate documentation of a wide variety of information. So, the standard requires what is known in ISO as a Management Agency – an organization separate from ISO that manages faster-changing aspects of a standard (generally ISO standards take three years to update). An example many AgGateway members may be familiar with is VDMA – the Management Agency for the Data Dictionary Identifiers (DDI’s) for ISO 11783.

The ISO 7673 standard is being revised to include information referencing AgGateway as the Management Agency for the controlled vocabularies. Once those tweaks and some other feedback are incorporated, it will be reintroduced in the ISO voting process to be approved as an international standard.

The Data Ethics working group has now officially wrapped up. The white paper is published and we will continue to promote and drive awareness. We kept the group open in case there was a need to update or incorporate any initial feedback, but no major questions or changes have been proposed. It is intended to be a living document, so if you find a gap or something that should be added or updated in the paper do not hesitate to pass along your feedback.

The Modus Plant Tissue team has completed documenting the v2 list of plant tissue lab tests methods. We are going through and doing the last few checks to ensure it aligns with the existing v2 soil and manure lists and plan to release the new method list after approval at the next Standards and Guidelines meeting. That will wrap up this working group, allowing Modus attention to shift to a v2 schema working group that will be kicking off soon.

Calls to Participate will also be going out this month for a new Dairy Feed Data working group focused on the data exchange between ration software and on-farm feed mixer systems. Also, we will be taking the next step in the Field Boundary family focusing on obstacles. Make sure to keep your eyes on your inbox (and maybe your spam folder) for these working group calls to participate.

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.