Fall Priorities on Road to Annual Meeting

Portfolio Update

Fall Priorities on Road to Annual Meeting

By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager

August proved to be a little quiet on the working group activity front, which is normal with many people taking a little time off over the summer – however, several current AgGateway initiatives made significant headway. And some new working groups were spun up with their sights set on wrapping up in time for the Annual Conference this November in Clearwater Beach, FL, USA.

The Data Ethics working group is continuing to promote and encourage comments and feedback on the new white paper. If you have not done so, please look it over and let me know what you think, there are a lot of great points to consider for anyone working with data. Be sure to check out the Inside AgGateway webinar recording that features some of the key insights and takeaways from a couple of the main contributors.

The Modus Plant Tissue team is continuing to chip away at the list and is getting down to the last few groups of methods that it will review and track down citations. They are on track to share the v2 list at the annual meeting. We are also continuing to hear from users who are proposing new methods or tweaks to the existing v2 soil and manure lists. Be sure you are following the GitHub repo to access the latest and greatest method lists.

Also on the Modus front, we held a meetup to discuss the data requirements for a v2 schema. There was general consensus on the need to fill some gaps and do a general refresh of the schema, so be on the lookout for a call to participate in the coming weeks – we will be seeking interested stakeholders to work on standardizing data exchange with agricultural test laboratories.

Following a need identified in an ADAPT Standard issue we also launched a new working group to develop a controlled vocabulary for field operations. Following in the footsteps of last year’s crop definition working group, this team is working on componentizing the definition of a field operation to help ensure semantic clarity. Documenting field operations is difficult, especially when one region has one name for an operation and a different region has another name for the same thing, so this will be no small feat. The team has some great existing resources to work with and is making good progress after just a handful of meetings.

There are a few other working groups in the works as well: we haven’t forgotten about the next steps for the dairy feed data work; and there is interest in getting a team kicked off to dig into the next project in the field boundaries work stream – obstacles. If you have interest in any of these topics or have something else you would like to address don’t hesitate to drop me a note or schedule a call to discuss.

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.