API - AGRO: An Open Data and Open API platform to promote interoperability standards for Farm Services and Ag Web Applications

Abstract

In accordance to National Program of Agricultural and Rural Development objectives, the project API-AGRO has been selected to improve interoperability and data exchange between agricultural stakeholders. This project is a non-contradictive new oncoming about the previous projects working on agricultural data exchanges trying to standardizing data format to insure exchange. Based on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), this emerging digital distribution channel enables data sharing with clear rules of use. 
 APIs can provide a hook for partners or third party developers to access data and services to build applications or to offer new services for different Farm Management Information Systems. In the French Ecophyto program, we observed that centralizing data from many different FMIS has shown its limits; all FMIS have their own standards, constraints and goals. This has led to the creation of a new FMIS to receive all the data collected from the farms national networks. In this context, APIs seem to be an innovative solution to expand data exchanges and promote open-innovation. Thus, we made the assumption that pooling data sets produced by different partners, or web services provided by API, will facilitate the design of the new FMIS.
 We also believe that APIs could boost innovation in the agricultural ecosystem by integrating new players (start-up, for example) promoting co-development of disruptive web applications for e-agriculture.
 So we designed the API-AGRO platform from an agronomic references inventory existing in each program’s partner. The platform offers unified access to a data set in open or private mode and a set of Open or Private-APIs (reserved for specific partners or clients) This paper will present the main functionalities of the full platform. We will focus on user interfaces with the visualization and the data extraction tools and on the API console designed for developers.