The importance of interoperability 

Arne Berre, SINTEF and DEMETER Standardisation Activity Coordinator

One of the key challenges towards the realization of smart farming solutions is related to the lack of interoperability between different systems and platforms in the agri-food sector, especially the ones offered by different technology providers. It is also a concern for farmers that the technology that they invest in will become outdated. DEMETER is addressing these needs for technical and semantical interoperability through the Agricultural Interoperability Space (AIS) and the underlying Agriculture Information Model (AIM). The former offers a wide range of interoperability mechanisms that facilitate the development, validation and deployment of the DEMETER solution, while the latter provides the common (semantic) language used by DEMETER enabled applications to exchange data.

Read more here. 

DEMETER Pilot Co-Creation Workshops

Nils Hempelmann, OGC and DEMETER Pilot Management Leader

The DEMETER pilots cover a wide spectrum of sub-sectors: arable crops, irrigated crops, fruit production and livestock (poultry, dairy, animal welfare). These pilots are used to demonstrate and evaluate how innovations and extended capabilities benefit from the interoperability mechanisms and integrate with the set of DEMETER core enablers. The core enablers are needed for creating any DEMETER applications and thus mandatory for any interested stakeholder who wishes to expose or share his/her own resources.

Based on feedback collected in individual interviews with each of the pilots, it became apparent that frequent cross-pilot and cross-work-package interactive sessions would provide a major improvement from a coordination as well as a progress perspective.

Read more here.

 DEMETER Open Call Winners & synergies

Ramón Alcarria, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM)

The first DEMETER Open Call, called DEVELOP, attracted and engaged SMEs with technology products that can be implemented within the Agro-business. A total of 10 companies have been beneficiaries of the Open Call, to solve the following challenges:

1- Soil workability and humidity monitoring: focused on increasing the precision of soil humidity. WAISENSE FIELDS, W4A-SoilWorkability, SoilSignal and Soily projects work on this topic.

2- Interoperable Geo Tagged Photo APP: to demonstrate DEMETER interoperability enabler for Farm Management Information Systems. CAP/P project address this topic.

3- ISOBUS enabler: Developing an interoperability Gateway software component enable interoperability between different agriculture hardware, tools, and systems without any deep knowledge about the ISOBUS protocol. ELLIOT-ISOBUS proposal has been selected for this challenge.

4- Blockchain-based solutions for agricultural applications: to enable traceability and interoperability with DEMETER components as an agri-food vertical solution. The PerSePHOne project works on this aspect.

5- DEMETER Business process integration (BPM): to enable the efficient sharing of data between business processes, planning each step of production process, optimal usage of all resources, defining work orders, defining products shipping plan, setting a marketing budget etc. The DEBBIE, CollectGood and OPTIFLAXIT projects are responsible for contributing to this challenge.

Read more here. 

DEMETER White Paper - Farmers' Needs and Concerns

Grainne Dilleen, Walton Institute and Daniel Wolferts, Fraunhofer FIT

Farmers’ decisions are a complex process influenced by several social, cultural, demographic, and financial factors. To better understand how the farmer feels about technology adoption and related needs and concerns, we conducted a series of interviews with farmers participating in DEMETER.  The aim was to learn more about their on-farm experiences, their technological needs and concerns and how DEMETER can help to overcome these issues. In addition, interviews were carried out with software providers involved in DEMETER who work closely with farmers to understand their viewpoint. A white paper was created summarising the findings from the interviews.

Read more here.

DEMETER Sister Project - ATLAS

Manolis Tsantakis, ATLAS Communication and Dissemination Coordinator

We catch up with Manolis Tsantakis from the Horizon 2020 project, ATLAS, to learn more about their objectives and activities. 

Can you explain to us about the ATLAS project and its objectives?
Modern farming is switching to a data-driven approach. Connectivity and interoperability of systems and equipment used in agriculture are crucial factors in the digital transformation of the sector. The ATLAS Interoperability Network will provide the means to interconnect different farming systems and agricultural equipment, tractors, sensor systems and data analysis tools etc, and to establish the flow of data between them. This is indeed an innovative step since it overcomes the current constraints, as well as paves the way for modern data-driven agriculture. Making available tools and solutions interoperable is preferable over replacing them and this is the approach that the ATLAS project follows. Making well established and specialized tools interoperable and leaving the decision about which tool to use to the end-user. The development of the ATLAS Interoperability Network is a bottom-up initiative involving stakeholders from all important agricultural domains, focusing on a technical interoperability which enables the exchange of information between different existing systems. As each of these participating systems is independent and built upon its own technical infrastructure, this leads to a distributed, non-centralized network of systems. In a nutshell, the ATLAS Interoperability Network will provide the means to interconnect different agricultural software systems and equipment and to establish the flow of data between them.

Read more of the interview here.

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