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AgGateway, a nonprofit consortium of 240+ companies, leveraged its wide crosssection of PA stakeholders to propose a collaborative solution.
General Problem
In building the ADAPT model we first threw in everything we could think of.
Then we realized that it was just too fat to be effectively used. In addition, there was a lot of US-centric stuff in it.
We wanted this model to be useful on a global scale since many of our stakeholders operate internationally.
So we downsized the model, keeping only the "lowest common denominator" properties for each business object.
We came up with the ContextItem system as a place to dump all the rest of the stuff that was needed.
This turned out to be a good idea because it allowed us to solve other problems inherent to the domain like
- "Everybody uses different terms for the same thing" - this system provides a controlled vocabulary that will improve data quality
- "Data requirements keep changing" - this system is inherently dynamic; new data points are easily added and distributed
- Local business process
The broad adoption of precision agriculture (PA) is still limited by a lack of hardware/software systems interoperability.
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