Development of Interoperable and Scalable Platform for Open Farm Information System

Abstract

Modern farming asks a farmer not only managing a larger size farm than before, but also lots of documentation and decisions to produce agricultural products environmental-friendly and to prove that they are safe to eat. There are various restrictions and regulations such as specific production guidelines, environmental compliance and GAP standards. In the agricultural information age, farm management information system (FMIS) has been developed to help a farmer in making correct decisions and keeping documents related to all his activities. However, there are still serious obstacles to be solved before FMISs are widely adopted by farmers. Most FMISs could not support all services because they were developed for specific purposes such as environment monitoring, GIS-based yield monitoring or field indexing, daily farming logs, food traceability system, etc.. Diversity of structures and types of agricultural data has exposed the lack of interoperability between different FMISs. The services in FMISs are dedicated to certain hardware. Also, the system is expensive and too complicate to use without specialized education. This research was accomplished to develop an interoperable and scalable platform for a FMIS named OFIS (Open Farm Information System) which support virtual office where a farmer organizes his farming information and uses other agricultural information provided by public domain. There was a preliminary survey to evaluate the informatization status of farmers and to draw strategies to develop OFIS in 2012. It revealed that farmers were suffering technical problems in managing computers. For example, the computer for FMIS was powered-off frequently to save electricity or unconsciously, even though the FMIS should be executed 24/7. Based on the result of the survey, conceptual and functional architectures were designed for orchard farmers who need environmental data in his field and inside of fruit storage room for improving tree management and keeping quality of the harvested fruits. OFIS was conceptually designed as an integrated system for farm management based on cloud computing technologies. In this concept, an OFIS for a farm is executed in a single virtual machine. Therefore, OFIS can be scaled out just adding virtual machines when the number of managed farms increases. Three key components for interoperability of OFIS were an embedded system supporting a standardized method to transfer agricultural data through the Internet, data exchange platform to help with collecting data and sharing data for OFIS, and external service environment to communicate with external service developed and serviced by other service providers. An embedded system which transfers agricultural data through the Internet based on a standardized method was developed. Among various standards, Sensor Observation Service (SOS) of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) was chosen as a communication standard. The embedded system implemented three core operations of SOS – GetCapabilities, DescribeSensor, GetObservation – as a web service. The power consumption of the embedded system was just 9~12W and the response time was 1.27 sec / 30 obs. The data exchange platform was developed as a combination of data collection service and data sharing service. The data collection service collects data from multi-type data sources like sensor networks at a farm and agricultural information systems (AIS) supporting OpenAPI. Four AISs supporting OpenAPI and one web page not supporting OpenAPI were analyzed. Based on the analysis, a data processing model was defined and agricultural data collector was designed and implemented. The data sharing service was developed to provide data of a farm like basic farm information, sensor observations, and work history saved by farmers. The data sharing interface was designed and implemented to access these types of data using RESTful interface. The data consistency was 100%. Although there was an error collecting data from the web page, it could be solved using separated configurations. The last component was OFIS external service environment to interact with other system. The external service interface describes how to develop an extension for OFIS. Using the interface, a service provider can provide a service through OFIS. It meant that OFIS could support external and future functions for a farmer and a service provider might focus on his core function not whole functions of FMIS. There were four types of external services – data, model, view and application. The external services were managed by OFIS service catalog. OFIS architecture was designed to be scalable based on cloud computing technologies. OFIS could interact with other system using three key components which were developed and evaluated in this research. OFIS could handle OGS SOS standard and four OpenAPI services and support external service. These characteristics could add value to OFIS that users could utilize external or future functions and varied information.