Kelly Nelson, Stuart Rhea (Unlicensed)
Prompt from abstract:
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.
Please write below:
The ISO11783 Plugin
One of the first plugins developed for ADAPT was the "ISO Plugin" to provide support for files following the ISO11783 standard. At the time of writing the ISO plugin is actually already on its second revision, the plugin is unique in that it is made available under the same open source license as the ADAPT Framework. This opened up the plugin for the wider community to contribute to its creation and improvement. The development of this plugin serves several purposes, the most obvious being ADAPT compatibility with the numerous machines and terminals that follow the 11783 standard. This is very important for the European marketplace which has very widespread adoption of the ISO standard, there are also a growing number of machines and terminals compatible with the standard in other parts of the world as well. This one plugin allowed ADAPT to enable FMIS's to read/write to many different OEM's helping to increase the value integrators receive for implementing the framework even before many OEM's have developed plugins for their proprietary formats.
A second purpose of making the ISO plugin available, and using the open source plugin was to give other OEM's a starting point. Without some open source plugin to draw from OEM's with their own proprietary formats had a lot of work to create their own plugin from scratch. The ISO plugin can be used as a guide on how the ADAPT team would like to handle different edge cases as well as base to build from and tweak to create a plugin fora proprietary format. All plugins serve basically the same function, to map data from one format into or out of the ADAPT model, providing FMIS and other software companies a common interface for all file formats. Utilizing the open source ISO plugin allows OEM's to have a functional plugin to look at to see how it works, but since it is under the open source license they also have the potential to reuse some of the code where applicable reducing their overall development effort.
A third purpose of the ISO plugin was to help drive more consistent implementation of the ISO11783 standard itself. As with most standards, the purpose is to get all parties to do things in the same way where possible while not inhibiting competition. However standards are created by parties who often have very different approaches and goals come together to create a common understanding. This generally leads to some grey areas in the standard where they could not come to full agreement. The ISO11783 standard is no different, in an effort to not limit the viability of different solutions the standard had to be flexible enough to support very different use cases and solutions. This however leads to slightly different implementations that can be confusing and cause incompatibility between different systems that both follow the standard. The Agricultural industry Electronics Foundation (AEF) has worked to develop conformance tests for the ISO11783 standard to resolve this issue. The conformance tests are created to drive a common implementation of the standard to increase compatibility between systems and minimize the differences in implementation. The AEF's efforts have predominately focused on machine to machine interface (tractor-implement) portions of the standard, with not as much focus put toward the compatibility of field computers and FMIS systems. The ADAPT team worked closely with the AEF FMIS conformance test team during the development of the ISO plugin to help insure it would follow the FMIS conformance test requirements. The hope being that the ADAPT plugin could be used as a means to implement the conformance test requirements, almost automatically to an FMIS that implements the framework. This would also have the effect of driving OEM's to ensure their field computers were compatible with the ADAPT ISO plugin as a kind of conformance test. If the OEM did not agree with the implementation within the ISO plugin or was unable to change their implementation, they would then have the option to develop their own, essentially proprietary ISO plugin to support their specific implementation of the standard using the original ADAPT plugin as the open source base for their development.