Setting a Course for Success

Portfolio Update

Setting a Course for Success

By Ben Craker, AgGateway Portfolio Manager

With the start of the new year people often reflect on the achievements of the past year and look ahead to what the new year may bring. For the Portfolio Management Center, it is a time to reengage and get back to work. During the holidays calendars tend to get crammed with personal and professional commitments, which often results in low attendance and cancelled meetings as the year winds down. So we spent a lot of time in January reconnecting and confirming regular meeting schedules, while also starting up a couple of new Working Groups.

That said, Working Groups have been making progress toward their deliverables. Highlights include:

WG00 Agrisemantics is putting a renewed focus on developing proof of concept semantic infrastructure. The goal is to have a system that can help manage semantic resources produced within AgGateway Working Groups. This key area will have far reaching implications as sharing a common meaning and controlled vocabularies is a key element of many interoperability solutions that have been or will be developed though AgGateway.

WG13 Closed Loop Spray is reviewing the projects scope and deliverables and working to align with other data linking related efforts. The team reviewed their work to date and discussed how best to move forward with regard to the interaction and dependencies between different Working Groups and other activities in the industry related to documenting plant protection product use. A likely next step will be to gap check some of the data models the team has reviewed against the ADAPT model to ensure use cases like closed loop spray are supported.

WG15 Scale Ticket Working Group has wrapped up uses cases and reviewing data elements and is shifting focus to identifying and gap checking existing standards that could be leveraged to create a digital scale ticket. The team is also working to ensure the result of their work is compatible with other commodities like fertilizer, not just grain or feed.

WG17 Field Boundary Use Case and Definitions started the year off with a great face-to-face meeting in Iowa. The group that met there made some great progress and is very close to wrapping up the deliverables for the Working Group. In the next meetings the output from that meeting will be reviewed by the larger group to ensure everything is in order and the wider group agrees with the recommendations.

Two new Working Groups will also have their first meetings in early February. WG19 ADAPT Serialization will be kicking off with an aggressive schedule set by the Working Group chairs. WG20 Traceability API will also start the next phase in the data linking projects around the same time focusing on modeling key traceability API elements.

If you’ve set a goal to be more involved in the industry and help to solve interoperability issues impacting your business, you can sign up for any active working group at any time by completing the Join a Working Group form here. Or if you are ready to implement resources that are already developed but don’t know where to start feel free to contact me and I’ll point you in the right direction. I look forward to seeing what interoperability headaches we will resolve in the new year!