Open Farm Information System data-exchange platform for interaction with agricultural information systems

Abstract

Information systems for agriculture have been developed from simple data storage and management. They have been designed to support farm-automations or services that employ optimal decision-making techniques by integrating data from other information systems. The interfacing capability of an information system is critical to realizing additional values. Open Farm Information System (OFIS), which is an integrated system for farm management, uses a data-exchange platform to communicate with other information systems based on web-service technology. OFIS data-exchange platform consists of two services: data collection and sharing. For these services, an abstract data collection procedure for external data and data sharing interface used to access internal data stored in OFIS were designed as open interface. In order to evaluate OFIS data-exchange platform, two use cases were illustrated and a data consistency test was conducted. The use cases revealed that the platform was flexible in collecting from various data sources such as web services and serial communication devices. For the data consistency test, the data-collection service collected data from target data sources without any data loss, while the data-sharing service provided all expected data without error.