Successful Test for Implementation of Final Part of PAIL

Irrigation

Successful Test for Implementation of Final Part of PAIL

By Dan Berne, AgGateway Portfolio Manager

Members of the PAIL Team (carried over from the Precision Ag Irrigation Leadership project) have successfully tested the implementation of part 2 of the PAIL data exchange standard for irrigation. Parts 1 and 3 of are already a national standard (ANSI S632). Part 2 of PAIL deals with the observations and measurements data. It is an agricultural implementation of the ISO 19156 standard, a conceptual schema for observations, and for features involved in sampling when making observations. The test was led by Diganta Adhikari and Andres Ferreyra. It involved two companies: a data producer (IRROMETER) and a data consumer (Syngenta).

The first task was to translate the data coming in IRROMETER’s proprietary format to the PAIL standard format. This was a fairly easy translation. Because IRROMETER does not typically send metadata for logger/sensor setup and configuration, that data had to be retrieved from their backend system and translated into the PAIL format.

The second, and very important objective, was to preserve the meaning of the data during the translation. The team did this by converting the codes that come from the IRROMETER system to standardized observation codes. The team explicitly declared the units of measure in the PAIL format, using the standardized code list from AgGateway’s ADAPT’s framework.

IRROMETER, like many manufacturers, sends a very compact data set from the logger to its cloud server. These small packets contain encoded information which can be difficult to decipher as the data moves from the IRROMETER cloud server to the Syngenta cloud server. In order to overcome this obstacle, the team was able to tease out the different kinds of information contained in the smaller data packets and separate them into separate “bins” in the PAIL format. This means that a data producer (e.g. IRROMETER) can send standardized data payloads to a data consumer (e.g. Syngenta).

Figure 1: Preserving the Meaning of the Logger Data

The team used a TrisoTech decision modeler and notation tool to ensure that the meaning of the data coming from IRROMETER was preserved.

The next step is to use the test results for completing the implementation document for PAIL Part 2 and submit it to AgGateway’s Standards & Guidelines Committee for approval.