...
A dashboard organizing the content can be found here: PAC / ADAPT 2018 Conference Communications Content Dashboard
PWP | Conference | Date / Location | Topic | People involved | Abstract | Status | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | VDI Smart Equipment | Building Global Field Operations Interoperability One Asset at a Time: AgGateway’s Open-Source ADAPT Project | (May differ from final) Farmers increasingly find themselves exchanging data with various partners. The reasons for this increase range from ever-increasing regulatory pressure, to the need for increased efficiency in the context of increasing input process and decreasing harvested commodity prices, to the public's concern about food safety and origin. Unfortunately, the bottom-up way that agricultural data has grown in the past 20 years has led to serious interoperability problems, due partly to the wide variety of proprietary formats, code lists, etc. in use in the industry; partly to the lack of universal use of unique identifiers, and also the profusion of proprietary controlled vocabularies (i.e., code lists) and concepts. AgGateway is a consortium of 200+ companies seeking to solve these problems in supply-chain and field operations, with an emphasis on collaboration and the implementation of existing standards whenever possible. Initially AgGateway’s work was focused on solving supply chain (manufacturers, distributors) “pain points”, then moved to the retailer, and finally to the grower's field operations. ADAPT is an open-source project initiated by AgGateway that seeks to put in place infrastructure that can enable the needed interoperability. ADAPT has two primary components:
Converting formats, however, is not enough to guarantee interoperability: a system of shared meaning is also required. For this reason, ADAPT has been designed with an emphasis on unique identifiers, and the use of data-type registries and other semantic assets that can ensure that all the participants in a data exchange process interpret the data in the same way. This paper describes business and technical aspects of ADAPT, including its data model, plug-in architecture, licensing and governance, and ongoing AgGateway work on data ownership and privacy. | Abstract submitted | |||
| 2 | 14th ICPA | June 24-27 Montreal, Quebec | ADAPT: A Rosetta Stone for Agricultural Data | Modern farming requires increasing amounts of data exchange among hardware and software systems. Precision agriculture technologies were meant to enable growers to have information at their fingertips to keep accurate farm records (and calculate production costs), improve decision-making and promote efficiencies in crop management, enable greater traceability, and so forth. The attainment of these goals has been limited by the plethora of proprietary, incompatible data formats among equipment manufactures and farm management information systems (FMIS), along with a lack of common semantics (meaning) in the industry. Proposed partial solutions exist; e.g., the ISO11783.10 standard XML format is well-known and respected, but it is machinery-specific and does not include business-process details needed by growers’ FMIS. AgGateway is an industry consortium of 200+ companies in the agricultural industry. In 2013-14, its SPADE project explored the feasibility of the industry developing an open-source format conversion toolkit. This experience led to what is now its ADAPT Committee. The ADAPT team created a common object model or "Application Data Model" (ADM), a super-set of field operations data models presented by participating companies. The goal: to replace the current, fragile situation, where FMIS must support multiple hardware data formats, and each machinery manufacturer has to interact with multiple software companies, with a single ADM integration mediated by a framework (initially built on .NET Framework 4.5) from which manufacturer-specific plug-ins convert to and from proprietary formats. This enables the FMIS to read/write to a wide variety of systems with little incremental effort, using ADAPT as a form of a digital agriculture Rosetta stone. A special emphasis was placed on developing a data-driven approach to managing geopolitical-context-dependent information, and on delivering shared meanings (semantic resources) through application programming interfaces (APIs). Licensing is an important consideration when seeking to promote the wide adoption of a software platform. The ADAPT Committee selected the well-known, and broadly accepted, open-source Eclipse Public License for the ADM, the conversion framework, and community plug-ins. The licensing model for proprietary plug-ins is different from that of the community-supported tools: each plug-in writer can choose whatever licensing and distribution model best fits their business model. Several machinery manufacturers have already begun writing plug-ins for their hardware; their projects are at different stages of development. There are currently two community-supported plug-ins: one to convert ISO ISO11783-10 XML files; and another to perform lossless serialization and de-serialization of ADM instances. The former serves as a template for machinery companies that use the ISOXML format to customize, and the latter enables FMIS-to-FMIS communication, a critically-important function that the industry has been lacking. Future plans for community-supported plug-ins include one for the Precision Agriculture Irrigation Language (PAIL) format, and another for sustainability metrics. The ADAPT Committee has a GitHub repository for source code, a transparent governance system, an email list for questions (ADAPT.Feedback@AgGateway.org), and accepts contributions from outside AgGateway. The application’s scope includes self-propelled machines, non-mechanical processes, observations and measurements, and post-harvest traceability. The intention is for it to facilitate the growth of digital agriculture. | Abstract submitted ID #5366 | ||
| 3 | ASABE AIM | July 29-Aug 1 Detroit, MI | AgGateway and how it fits into the standards landscape | Draft HERE Contemporary farming requires increasing amounts of data exchange among a myriad of hardware and software products. Growers and other stakeholders need these products to interoperate, but implementation of data exchange standards has been uneven across the industry, especially among software companies. AgGateway is an industry consortium dedicated to promoting the implementation of standards in digital agriculture. It provides a collaborative environment where the industry can discuss interoperability pain points, identify standards that can address those pain points, and then engage the corresponding standards organizations to collaborate on implementation and/or enhancements. This paper reviews a set of standards relevant to agricultural field operations and supply chain data exchange, created by organizations such as AEF, AgXML, ASABE, ISO, OAGI, and W3C; it then describes the relevance of these standards to AgGateway’s interoperability projects such as ADAPT, CART, PAIL, PICS, and SPADE, which cover a wide range of processes. The discussed processes involve field operations, such as planting, crop nutrition, crop protection, irrigation, harvest, and post-harvest; and also supply-chain operations pertaining to crop inputs (seed, crop protection and fertilizers) and traceability of harvested commodities. | Abstract submitted ID #1302 Response 1/29 Due 6/15 | ||
| 4 | ASABE AIM | July 29-Aug 1 Detroit, MI | Implementing Grain Traceability Standards with CART | The Commodity Automation by Rail and Truck (CART) project is a joint development effort of AgGateway's Precision Ag Council and Grain and Feed Council. The project aims to provide grain traceability from field to fork. Doing this involved understanding the business processes and data exchanges required, all the way from farm operations through grain elevators to receiving at a feed manufacturer; exploring solutions through small proof-of-concept (PoC) projects; and enhancing and implementing existing standards, primarily the ISO 11783 standard for farm machinery electronics, and the AgXML standard for grain data exchange. Other existing standards and emerging technologies such as IoT and Blockchain were evaluated against these processes for suitability, and recommendations for enhancements and implementation were provided to the industry. Gaps for future enhancements were identified for future research and follow-up, especially for out-of-band processes including logistics provides and grain movement operations through aging elevators that have minimal human-machine interface integration and process control automation. Various Proof-of-Concepts (PoC) were conducted in 2014, 2017 and 2018, covering key itinerary legs of the business process, focusing on commodity transfers from source container to target containers, duration of the transfer, and method of the transfer. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons were used to pair containers following an Internet of Things (IoT) approach. A set of proposed changes to the ISO 11783-10 standard emerged from the field operations PoCs, and is detailed. Additionally, a set of changes was proposed to the AgXML standard, which will result in a new release (version 5.0) of the same. The latter includes a new IoT message called TransferEvent and a bundling of one or more of these TransferEvents into the existing AgXML CommodityMovement message under an element named RelatedTransferEvents. Representation of the AgXML TransferEvent in JSON format is also presented, and compared to other IoT ingestion methods. The applicability of these standards within each of the processes is defined. The business benefits using these standards include: | Abstract submitted IS #1319 Response 1/29 Due 6/15 |
...