Projektnehmer:
Rostock University, Faculty of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, Institute
for Management of Rural Areas, Professor of Geodesy und Geoinformatics
TP-Titel:
Investigation of internet based information platform and data documenting
system for the cooperative projekt
TP Kurztitel:
Project information system
TP-Ziele:
Administration of a web server for outward presentation and maintenance
of
the project information for publicity.
Support for coordinated transfer of project data and communication of project partners in a protected area of the web site.
Supply of internet technology and web services to support interoperable data- and service infrastructur for application in information driven plant production.
Stellung des TP im Verbund:
Center of digital storage for data from all project parts and platform
for project coordination and -control.
Supply of hardware and software for spatial data infrastructure (SDI) for precision
agriculture.
Configuration of services
and implementation of data structures given through input of the data modelling
project TP7.
Integration of automated process dokumentation TP 8 and support for the development
of a web server for the supply of dynamicaly process data retrieval.
Supply of preagro geodata for information processing in farm management systems
TP 17.
Consideration of schemas from standardization process for office software TP
18
and for the standardized data format agroXML for precision farming TP 19 for
the implementation of services and supply of data.
Supply of technical basics for the investigation of sustainability in the value-added
chain of plant production TP 1.
Abstract:
Geo-Information (GI) are an essential component of the public,
economical and private life. The importance of Geo-Information is increasingly
recognized
within all ranges of the society. A high economical potential is assumed
when using GI systematically and wherever possible. Nevertheless the market
for GI has not developed as strong as expected, may be because organizational,
juridical and technical limitations. A solution to overcome this type of
problems is the establishment of spatial data infrastructures (SDI).
In agriculture and especially in Precision Agriculture the importance of Geo-Information
is rising up, too. Precision Agriculture is dealing with the assimilation of
agricultural applications to the natural heterogeneity outside in the fields.
Using such technologies the total yield should increase, the means of production
should decrease and the environment should be conserved. The assimilation to
the spatial variability requires spatial data about the soil, the crop, the
terrain, the land machinery, and the applications. Special analysis must be
executed with GIS and many different data has to be managed. Farmers spend
much time in the data management, they usually are not that interested in the
procurement and evaluation of data. By using of different devices, which support
different data formats, and improperly spatial reference systems the farmer
has to transform the data between proprietary GIS and coordinate systems. The
low economical potential for the reduction of means of production enforce to
save time and cost in data management. In addition the demands on traceability,
sustainability and a transparently crop production are increasing. A solution
from the farmers perspective will be the relocation of the tasks for data management
to service providers, which are able to establish a comprehensive SDI. The
introduction of interoperability and a web-service based SDI in agriculture
has many advantages and is related to many actual GI-related research themes,
expressed also on the AGILE conferences. An operational SDI in agriculture
supports e-Government, e.g. in topics such as the European integrated management
and controlling system (InVeKoS) and consolidation of farming. If Geo-Information
from agriculture will become a wider accessibility through a SDI it may be
easily used in other communities and for other purposes, like disaster management
to evaluate the diseases or the damages in crop through natural disasters like
dryness or flood. In Precision Agriculture also digital terrain models, soil
data or detailed data about the water flows are often used. This information
can also be of interest for other e.g. environmental purposes. With the development
of an operational SDI the semantic interoperability will be improved. The building
of semantic homogeneous data models as well as standardized metadata belongs
to the development of an interoperable Geo-spatial technology. The implementation
of spatial services as web services is matching the idea of the OpenGIS Consortium
(OGC).
The problems, which were described above, inspired us to carry out research
in this field. For the design of an interoperable SDI some common aspects were
examined by researchers such as Vckovski (1999). He defines the interoperability
simply as “ability to exchange and integrate information”, pp. 32. Bishr (1998)
divides it in semantically, schematically and syntactically heterogeneity.
He stated that the semantic depends on the subject area. The heterogeneity
in names has to be solved by standardization. The cognitive heterogeneity can
be solved by using the concept of Extensible Markup Language (XML) name spaces.
The syntactical heterogeneity, as the third form, means, for example, that
geometry can be coded by vector or raster structure. To describe the geometry
in a uniform structure, the Geography Markup Language was established and is
coming more and more into use. In former days data conversion was used to realize
the interoperability. To convert the data from one system to the data format
of another system, look up tables were used (Sondheim, et al., 1999). In this
strategy errors, redundancy and inconsistency can occur. To minimize the loss
of information a semantically all-embracing model was introduced. The form
of conversation is known as “smart translation” or “semantic translation”.
In the newer age were used special transfer formats, e.g. XML or the Spatial
Data Transfer Format (SDTS). They divide into data model and data format. Today
the term of interoperability is not restricted to the data exchange rather
it is extended also to the transfer of functionality between different systems.
This will be realized by interfaces. We know many manufacturer dependend interfaces.
The communication between these proprietary interfaces is often a problem,
like in the case of Precision Agriculture. To get the independence of those
interfaces manufacturer neutral interfaces was developed. One well-known is
the Structured Query Language (SQL). To realize the communication between different
clients and data base systems in a distributed client server architecture middleware
was integrated.
The development of such manufacturer independent interfaces for Geo-Information
is one of the primary targets of the OGC. All the investigations of the last
years move along to there initiatives and flow into abstract and implementation
specifications. Whether the implementation specification can be used for the
purposes of a SDI in Precision Agriculture is one of the first aims of our
research. We would like to find answers to the questions: Which standards can
be used and what has to be standardized? We would like to implement a SDI concept
for Precision Agriculture on a concrete use case. The development of a metadata
standard for Precision Agriculture data was investigated by Korduan (2002).
This was a prerequisite to establish a SDI prototype. The main components of
our concept are the data, the data storage, the OGC Web Services and an OGC
Client. The authors worked from 1999 to 2003 in the German research and development
project preagro to establish a management information system, Bill, Korduan
(2002). More details about the preagro project can be found under www.preagro.de.
In this project many different and heterogeneous data were collected. The data
pool build from practical farms was an ideal basis for the development of data
models and a data storage system with real characteristics for Precision Agriculture.
The data pool was also used for the extraction of important Precision Agriculture
related metadata to describe the data and to realize the data archiving and
retrieval in a catalogue system. A metadata profile based on the Content Standard
for Digital Geospatial Metadata (CSDGM) was developed (Korduan, 2003).
In the mean time services have been specified by the OGC to realize a SDI and
frame works are available to implement it. The decision about the service,
which should be used, depends on the kind of the GI as well as on the data
format and the functionality which should be provided. In the use case any
actor plays a role as data provider which only provide raster data. Data providers
have to implement a Web Service which support the access to their own vector
and raster data and provide raster data to the clients. This functionality
can be supported by the OGC Web Map Service. An OGC Web Coverage Service is
not necessary because the raster data will only be used as background images
in the client. Actors that provide vector data, which the client need for further
usage, have to implement a Web Feature Service. A third type of actors may
work as data broker because they request a foreign Web Service as Web client
to access data and provide it through its own service to other clients. The
result of our research work is a concept and a prototype of a SDI for Precision
Agriculture which supports the use case “soil sampling”.