ASABE Technical Library - Abstract

Abstract. Precision agriculture (PA) is still limited by a lack of hardware/software systems interoperability. AgGateway, a nonprofit consortium of 240+ companies, leveraged its wide cross-section of PA stakeholders to propose a collaborative solution: its ADAPT team created an open-source, field operations common object model. The goal: replace current systems‘ need to support multiple, incompatible data formats, with a single integration to the common object model and a system of manufacturer-specific format-conversion plug-ins. This enables reading/writing to new systems with marginal development cost. The common object model meets requirements from AgGateway‘s SPADE and PAIL projects, including compatibility with the ISO11783-10 standard (ISOXML) and participant companies‘ own systems.

Internationalization is important for this work, but conflicting requirements must be reconciled: ADAPT developers must seek universality, staying free of regionally-specific clutter. However, different geographies‘ business processes involve context-specific data (e.g., USA EPA product numbers.) If these "context items" are not accommodated, the common object model‘s relevance suffers. Additionally, it is desirable to use a controlled vocabulary. However, the dynamic nature of business and regulation requires this vocabulary to be easily extensible. ADAPT reconciled the contradictions by defining an object class, the ContextItem (CI), that can be attached to various other objects in the common object model. A ContextItem is a key/value structure where the “key” code references a ContextItemDefinition (CID) that defines what each CI means. The “value” is composed of a string value along with data needed to interpret it (such as a unit of measure) or a nested list of other CIs (e.g. PLSS cadastral information.) AgGateway‘s SPADE project implemented a RESTful API to provide a machine-readable vocabulary of CIDs; its Standards & Guidelines Committee created an ad-hoc group to manage the vocabulary. The CI system can be used jointly with ISOXML‘s feature of associating unique IDs to its own locally-scoped IDs (defined in ISO11783-10 Annex E.) This enables adding geopolitical-context-dependent data to ISOXML‘s otherwise generic and highly machine-specific scope, with no modifications.