Abstract

Introduction

(Opening sentence)

Need more food

(General Problem)

(Farmland not increasing)

The amount of land available for farming is not going to increase.

(Climate is changing)

More climate uncertainty --> more risk in crop production

(Irrigation is important)

Irrigation provides an important way to manage crop production risk

(But water is scarce)

But water is increasingly in short supply

(.. yet mismanaged )

Few growers use scientific irrigation scheduling methods, however.

(NEEA starts stuff)

NEAA brought together an important cross-section of the industry to discuss optimization of water / energy.

(Interoperability)

The group discovered that, even if the desire to cooperate collaborate was there, interoperability challenges, such as thoese

(Data standards)

The NEAA-sponsored group quickly agreed that data exchange standards were the starting point.

(Specific problem)

There's no 11783 for this stuff

(Organizations involved)

NEAA AgGateway

(PAIL)

(Goals of this paper)

This paper describes the three parts of the proposed standard, along with pertinent background information regarding the PAIL development process.

PAIL Fundamentals

Three major phases 1) Requirements-gathering 2) Alignment 3) Synthesis

Requirements-gathering

This included capturing user stories, modeling irrigation processes, and capturing data requirements for exchange.

Alignment

With Core Documents

Much work went into aligning PAIL's data requirements with the Core Documents model for field operations captured in the SPADE project (Plan, Observations & Measurements, Recommendation, Work Order, Work Record)

With ISO 19156

Limited-bandwidth a concern

With ADAPT

A third set of alignment activities was centered around harmonizing with the ADAPT Common Object Model.

Synthesis

Working PAIL data requirements back into ADAPT-compatible objects, and developing schemas to serialize the objects to XML, JSON, etc.