March Working Group Madness

Portfolio Update

March Working Group Madness

By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager

It is hard to believe that we are already talking about the Mid-Year Meeting, but here we are. I still have snow on the ground outside my window so it seems like June is a long way away, but it will be here before you know it.

Most of the AgGateway working groups are charging full steam ahead, making steady progress toward their deliverables and several will have great things to show in Altoona. We are also getting requests to spin up a couple new working groups so be on the lookout for calls to participate in the not-too-distant future.

And the transfer portal is still open! There are a couple of working groups below that could use a couple more volunteers to round out the roster, if you are interested or have questions on how you might be able to help any active working groups let me know!

  • The Entity (or End User, I may need to put a quarter in the swear jar) ID working group is continuing to align processes to ensure uniqueness when identifying organizations/people across the diverse range of stakeholders engaged in the working group. This also involved trying to square what “should happen” with the reality of busy salespeople trying to book orders. This is no small task, but the team has a plan and is continuing to chip away at the issue.
  • A group comprised of some of the leaders of the last three Modus working groups got together to sort out a few discrepancies between the soil, manure, and plant tissue method lists. After working through the list of issues, staff is working on updating the lists and a new version of each test method should be reviewed and approved by the Agrisemantics committee shortly.

    This will wrap up the Plant Tissue working group (WG28) just in time, as we are getting things organized to launch the next group that will work on Feed Analysis Methods. Be on the lookout for a call to participate from me in the next month or two so you can join the effort.
  • The Field Operations Controlled Vocabulary team is zeroing in on the different components that will be used to distinguish between field operations. The team put together a guide on how to select these values and is testing it with a variety of field operations, giving the instructions to multiple WG participants to see if everyone is able to arrive at the same values for the same operation. After a little more refinement, this group should be close to delivering a first draft of field operations populated with the Agricultural Activity Ontology (AAO) operations and the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation 2 (RUSLE2) operations.
  • We need your help with the Modus v2 Schema working group, please pass my info (ben.craker@aggateway.org) along to any agricultural laboratories you work with. The team needs a little more input from the lab community to inform the development of the v2 schema. There is a broad spectrum when it comes to the IT department at agricultural testing labs, so we want to get input from a few more labs to ensure what is created can be implemented by most labs.
  • The Field Boundary Obstacle team is having some great discussions on what aspects are needed to reliable share obstacle information. They are also building up a library of different sources of obstacle information. These will be used as examples to make sure the model they propose works for common use cases.

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.