2018 ICPA Introduction: General and Specific Problem

Prompt from abstract: 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.

(Material from unpublished 2016 ASABE paper)

Different brands of farm equipment and software currently collect and consume data in a variety of proprietary file formats. While this is a natural consequence of how the industry has grown, it makes it hard for end-users to “connect the dots” and extract value from the data.
Concurrently, current trends in sustainability, traceability, and compliance reporting demand an ever-increasing amount of data be gathered as part of everyday operations in modern production agriculture. This requirement usually includes significant amounts of frequently-changing geopolitical-context-dependent information such as identification numbers specific to the government agencies the grower interacts with in their jurisdiction. Fulfilling all of these requirements in the data model of farm management information system (FMIS) software is a moving target, unless it were somehow possible to decouple the infrequently- and frequently-changing aspects of the FMIS data model.
In terms of requirements thus placed on a data model, an FMIS object model should simultaneously be:
• generic, simple and compact enough to be easily understood and used, as well as accepted from an international perspective (which would suggest staying free of regionally-specific clutter), but still be able to support the capture & communication of necessary region-specific (i.e., geopolitical-context-dependent) data needed by growers and their partners as part of their business processes (simple/generic vs comprehensive/specific)
• able to express data with a controlled vocabulary (so everyone can understand what it means), but allowing that controlled vocabulary to be continually updated to match the nature of data requirements (static vs dynamic)
AgGateway (www.aggateway.org), a nonprofit consortium of about 240 companies dedicated to the implementation of standards for eAgriculture, created its Precision Agriculture Council in 2010 to collaboratively tackle these interoperability problems. This led to the creation of the ADAPT team, charged with implementing a toolkit to provide the industry with a common object model for field operations as well as a set of format conversion tools (AgGateway, 2016).
The ADAPT common object model meets requirements from AgGateway’s SPADE (planting, crop care, harvest and post-harvest - themed) and PAIL (irrigation, observations and measurements - themed) projects, as well as compatibility with the ISO11783-10 standard XML format (ISO, 2015) and participant companies’ own systems.
The promise of seamless interoperability among precision ag systems – regardless of the system manufacturer – has entered an exciting new stage with AgGateway’s ADAPT framework. ADAPT (Agricultural Data Application Programming Toolkit) will eliminate this barrier to the broad use of precision agriculture data, by easily enabling interoperability between different software and hardware applications.