Software architecture for farm management information systems in precision agriculture

Farm management information systems (FMIS) have steadily increased in their level of sophistication as they have included new technologies with Internet connectivity being the latest addition. However, few FMIS have used the full capabilities of the Internet, and the emerging concept of precision agriculture has little or no support in the current commercially available FMIS. FMIS for precision agriculture have certain additional requirements to traditional FMIS, which makes the implementation of these systems technically more complicated in several aspects. Our research aimed to identify the requirements posed by precision agriculture on FMIS and then evaluate a modern Web-based approach to the implementation of an FMIS that fulfilled these additional requirements. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.