Conference Communications

• Richard Andrus (Unlicensed)
• aberger@agsense.net (Unlicensed)
• Dan Berne (Unlicensed)
• Eugenia Durand
• R. Andres Ferreyra (Unlicensed) *
• Charles Hillyer (Unlicensed)
• Kiyoshi Honda
• Eric Hudish
• Bart Nef (Deactivated)
• Kyohei Ohtsuka
• Stuart Rhea (Unlicensed)
• Jim Wilson
• Corresponding author

Observations and measurements are the cornerstone of principled decision-making in agricultural field operations. They are the payload captured in crop scouting for crop protection, nutrition and harvest; in postharvest grain weight and quality certificates; in soil and manure lab tests; in asset management and telematics (e.g., observing grain bin / dryer conditions); and are also the multiple environmental inputs used to drive irrigation decisions.

The ISO 19156 standard defines a data model for representing various aspects of observations, such as ultimate and sampling features of interest, observed properties, and the procedures used to derive the observation result. However, the standard does not include vocabularies for capturing the myriad specific combinations of these aspects used in agriculture.

AgGateway’s global effort toward interoperability identified value in implementing an ISO 19156 – based model of observations and measurements for agricultural field operations. This work, centered on the PAIL, SPADE and ADAPT projects, emphasizes the explicit capture of the semantics of the various aspects of an observation. The work, performed by a group of industry and academic AgGateway participants spanning four continents, includes three major parts:

First, defining a componentized model of the properties of an observation, based on an extensible set of orthogonal vocabularies, which includes representing valid combinations of components.

Second, deploying infrastructure, in the form of a RESTful API, to make the componentized variable definitions freely available to industry and the research community; this includes putting into place an ISO 19135-based process for stakeholders to request the addition of vocabularies or entries therein.

Third, incorporating observations and measurements into AgGateway’s ADAPT common object model and format conversion plug-in architecture, thus enabling widespread interoperability.

ASABE keywords: measurement; information systems; data collection; ISO standard; software

Charles Hillyer (Unlicensed)*

aberger@agsense.net (Unlicensed)

Diganta Adhikari (Unlicensed)

Dan Berne (Unlicensed)

R. Andres Ferreyra (Unlicensed)

Bart Nef (Deactivated)

Richard Andrus (Unlicensed)

Kurtis Charling (Unlicensed)?

Joe Russo (Unlicensed)

Talk about workflows, use cases, success stories. Serve as a sort of implementation guideline start.

reiterate key concepts like basket of Ids.

Mention but not emphasize Drip & pumps

Poster and paper

• Ben Craker (Unlicensed)
• Charles Hillyer (Unlicensed)
• Stuart Rhea (Unlicensed)*
• R. Andres Ferreyra (Unlicensed)
• Shannon Haringx (Unlicensed)

State of industry now: what and how identifiers are used.

Infeasibility of centralized registry a la supply chain

Why is this relevant to academics?

• Shannon
• Marty Matlock
• Brandon? 
• Andres*

• Could include:
• Glossary
• ContextItems
• Representations
• OM codes
• ISO 19135 Governance
• ISO 25964

Helping machines and people agree on what things mean in production agriculture: AgGateway’s Glossary and Semantic Infrastructure

AgGateway is a nonprofit consortium of 240+ companies dedicated to advancing implementation of standards for interoperability in agriculture. That work was originally targeted to supply chain, but was expanded in 2010 to include field operations such as planting, crop protection, crop nutrition, irrigation, and harvest. An important deliverable of AgGateway field operations projects (SPADE, PAIL) has been to identify the data variables that support the growers’ field operations processes, and document their meaning. It subsequently became necessary to create machine-readable variable type registries, controlled vocabularies, and other semantic resources to enable and support interoperability, so all participants in a data exchange process (or their software, rather) can have access to the meaning of the data being exchanged. These resources will be made available to users primarily through one or more application programming interfaces (APIs) for use by farm management information systems (FMIS) and other software.

There are three fundamental types of variable registries in this semantic infrastructure: a) The Representation System, which describes “universal” variables (e.g., yield as mass per unit area) and grew from an internal representation system John Deere donated to the ADAPT project; b) The ContextItem System, which describes geopolitical-content-dependent variables (e.g., EPA numbers, FSA tract Ids) and complements the Representation system; c) Observation Codes, which are a specialized form of representation system built using the ContextItem system’s sophisticated architecture.

This infrastructure will require ongoing additions and maintenance, but the resource and APIs’ originating projects (e.g., SPADE, PAIL) have a finite duration. AgGateway’s Standards and Guidelines Committee consequently saw fit to create a Controlled Vocabularies Working Group (CVWG) to provide a permanent home for the semantic resources’ management processes. The overarching intent is to create resources that will be used extensively by the industry. An important precondition for that usage is transparency in governance; the CVWG has consequently derived its governance model from the ISO 19135 standard for register management.

AgGateway has also invested in a human-readable Glossary, hosted at www.agglossary.org and designed to bring together agricultural terminology from different sources (e.g., ASABE) as an educational resource and discussion-support tool. This resource includes a taxonomy for representing the origin and context of each term, and was initially hosted using the MediaWiki platform. The Glossary Team is now working toward upgrading the architecture of the glossary, seeking machine-readabiity and compatibility with the ISO25964 data model, in pursuit of maximizing the value of the resource to contributors and users of the data, especially for concepts and terms that may be contained within it and not in international efforts such as GACS (the Global Agricultural Concept Scheme), such as legal terms, and terms derived from ASABE (and other) standards.

• Andres
• Stuart*
• Simon / Nick?

Superseded by Semantic Infrastructure paper

Four ideas pitched to AgGateway-Europe for Agritechnica?

• CompoundIdentifier "basket of Ids"
• Reference data as an API-enabled distributed system
• Enabling principled decision-making: CP recommendation-centric case study

• Full, data-driven support for any geopolitical context