Euro­pean Commission’s Inno­va­tion Radar rec­og­nizes work on data inter­op­er­abil­i­ty in agriculture 

Every aspect of mod­ern dai­ly life gen­er­ates sig­nif­i­cant quan­ti­ties of data. Some­times over­whelm­ing amounts. And this data is only of val­ue when it can be read, under­stood and then employed for use­ful pur­pos­es. This prin­ci­pal applies equal­ly to fam­i­ly life as it does to agri­cul­ture. And this is pre­cise­ly what inspired a con­sor­tium of indus­try and aca­d­e­m­ic part­ners, includ­ing 365FarmNet, CNH Indus­tri­al, AGCO, Agroin­tel­li, Wagenin­gen Uni­ver­si­ty & Research, Kver­neland, with the sup­port of the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion with­in the frame­work of the IoF2020 scheme, to devel­op an open source data exchange method­ol­o­gy to pro­mote inter­op­er­abil­i­ty in agriculture.

This area is excep­tion­al­ly com­plex, as it requires col­lab­o­ra­tion between dif­fer­ent stake­hold­ers to be effec­tive – in essence all sys­tems need to com­mu­ni­cate using a com­mon lan­guage. And even before this com­mon lan­guage is devel­oped, stan­dards for data com­mu­ni­ca­tion and trans­fer were required. This is where AgGate­way – a stan­dard­iza­tion orga­ni­za­tion for agri­cul­tur­al e‑business – stepped in, and devel­oped the open-source ADAPT frame­work to be a ‘Roset­ta Stone’ for this agri­cul­tur­al data. This frame­work allows agri­cul­tur­al data, which is in dif­fer­ent for­mats, to be deci­phered and ensures there is a com­mon way to describe field operations.

The Farm Machine Inter­op­er­abil­i­ty use case in the IoF20202 EU project, in which 365FarmNet active­ly co-worked solved, these prob­lems by accel­er­at­ing the adop­tion of inter­op­er­abil­i­ty stan­dards – which also saw progress towards Sus­tain­able Devel­op­ment Goals 9 (Indus­try, Inno­va­tion and Infra­struc­ture), 12 (Respon­si­ble Pro­duc­tion and Con­sump­tion) and 13 (Cli­mate Action).

In order to fur­ther devel­op this for the real world, CNH Indus­tri­al, with the sup­port of Wagenin­gen Uni­ver­si­ty & Research, was instru­men­tal in devel­op­ing the Geo­J­SON ADAPT plug-in –cre­at­ed dur­ing the IoF2020 project under the Farm Machine Inter­op­er­abil­i­ty use case. 365FarmNet active­ly par­tic­i­pat­ed and devel­oped the proof of con­cept that laid the foun­da­tion for the devel­op­ment of the plu­g­in. It is this very plug-in which has received recog­ni­tion by the Euro­pean Union’s Inno­va­tion Radar. The Inno­va­tion Radar is a Euro­pean Com­mis­sion ini­tia­tive to iden­ti­fy high poten­tial inno­va­tions and inno­va­tors in EU-fund­ed research and inno­va­tion projects. The goal is to allow every cit­i­zen, pub­lic offi­cial, pro­fes­sion­al and busi­ness peo­ple to dis­cov­er the out­puts of EU inno­va­tion fund­ing and give them a chance to seek out innovators.

This new plug-in allows geospa­tial agri­cul­tur­al data to be deci­phered in eas­i­ly read­able and man­age­able files, is avail­able as open source and has been giv­en to the AgGate­way ADAPT com­mu­ni­ty. The Geo­J­SON ADAPT plug-in, can process dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ca­tion lan­guages used by var­i­ous agri­cul­tur­al com­pa­nies through the ADAPT frame­work, and con­verts them into the Geo­J­SON stan­dard­ized for­mat which can be read by a whole range of machines, agri­cul­tur­al and even non-agri­cul­tur­al soft­ware plat­forms. This makes it an enabler for both online, real time com­mu­ni­ca­tion and offline com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Fur­ther­more, the data tools which have been devel­oped are espe­cial­ly ben­e­fi­cial to pro­gram­mers who have no for­mer back­ground in agri­cul­tur­al data man­age­ment, there­by low­er­ing the entry lev­el for the aver­age data sci­en­tist or engi­neer who wish­es to become involved in the agri­cul­tur­al data space.

The Geo­J­SON ADAPT plug-in can be found at https://github.com/ADAPT/GeoJSONPlugin.