Managing Some Bumps in the Road

Portfolio Update

Managing Some Bumps in the Road

By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager and Jim Wilson, Chief Technology Officer

When AgGateway reorganized how various teams operated a few years ago, one of the main ideas was to create working groups that were tightly scoped, so volunteers knew what they were getting into. It is a lot easier to say you are willing to help solve a problem if you have an estimate of the time and effort expected to get to the resolution.

While we have hit the mark on many of the working groups, a couple of current projects have hit some bumps in the road, taking a little longer than planned. Problems that looked like some existing patterns could be applied to improve interoperability have proven to be a bit more difficult than expected.

End User Identification (WG27) is one of the projects that on its surface seems easy to solve, but as perspectives broaden to understand what different actors need to uniquely identify a grower entity, the situation quickly gets more complicated. The team had a good session at the Mid-Year Meeting and is working through comments on a white paper that is driving alignment and helping to lay out the options for resolving the long-standing pain point.

Field Operations Controlled Vocabulary (WG31) set out to try to apply the same particle of meaning approach used in the WG00 Crop Definition model. The team was off to a good start and incorporated several existing lists to try and build a series of controlled vocabularies where the unique combination of several dimensions would clearly communicate the field operation in an ADAPT Standard record. However, this led to several of the lists becoming very long to the point that it was impossible for two different people to come to the same set of values to describe an operation. The team has started refactoring the different dimensions and has gone back to the core use cases to try and consolidate the different values into something a little more manageable that will yield consistent outcomes.

The Field Boundaries: Obstacles (WG34) team applied a similar approach using different dimensions to describe an obstacle. They have fewer dimensions, each with short lists, so they seem to be making good headway on categorizing obstacles. They are now working on modeling other aspects of an obstacle that are key to determining “passability” – the different parameters required to determine if a machine can pass through an obstacle. For some it is straight forward (for example, nothing goes through a utility pole) but other obstacles like wet spots are only present sometimes, and some vehicles like drones can safely pass regardless. Understanding what values are relevant will be critical.

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.