Mobile farm equipment as a data source in an agricultural service architecture

Information management is becoming an increasingly challenging task for farmers, especially in terms of the amount of data and the complexity of processes in precision farming. One of the most demanding functions is data acquisition. Mobile farm equipment featuring different sensors is able to collect a large amount of data while working. Automated process-data acquisition can be the basis for information-steered agricultural production. But use of these data is restricted today by hardware and software compatibility, different data formats, the lack of a concept for reusing data, and the amount of data. This paper presents a prototype implementation of an agricultural process-data service (APDS). It is part of an infrastructure for data management in information-driven plant production, developed in the Pre agro joint research project. Data are recorded in an ISOBUS environment and transferred to a server. There they are analyzed and aggregated to jobs. Data can be requested for further use via a web portal and a web service interface. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.