A service infrastructure for the representation, discovery, distribution and evaluation of agricultural production standards for automated compliance control

Abstract

Modern agricultural production is governed by a variety of production standards that restrict and guide farming practices. Controlling the compliance of farms to these standards is currently a considerable and expensive manual effort for several stakeholders of agriculture; an effort that could be alleviated with suitable information technology. This article identifies the requirements and proposes a design for a service infrastructure that transfers the production standards in a computer encoded and machine interpretable format between the stakeholders of modern agricultural production. These encoded production standards can then have an immediate benefit for farmers and providers of Farm Management Information Systems (FMIS), ultimately enabling automated compliance control with existing farm data. The functionality of the infrastructure is demonstrated with a precision fertilisation case, where compliance to several fertilisation restrictions is controlled and confirmed automatically. The proposed REST-based service infrastructure was found sufficient in fulfilling the identified requirements. Automated compliance control for a fair proportion of production standards, despite several technical challenges, can be reasonably achieved with existing technologies as a lightweight infrastructure of REST-based Web services.