Decision Support for Agricultural Consultants With Semantic Data Federation

Abstract

Informational needs of agricultural consultants are increasingly complex. Advising farmers on the appropriate measures for optimizing cropping yields demands access to custom data archives and analytics tools. In line with the increasing number of archives, the expertise required of consultants goes beyond the capabilities of these non-technical agri-specialists. These end users have diverse ad-hoc query needs and require tools that provide simple access to distributed data silos and easy ways to integrate relevant information. In this article, the authors report on a pilot deployment of Semantic Automated Discovery and Integration (SADI) Web services for the federation and computation of agricultural data. A registry of 9 SADI Web services was deployed to expose data from a variety of different data resources in support of a defined set of query needs. The authors demonstrate that the deployment of these services facilitates the ad-hoc creation and execution of mission critical workflows targeting use cases in agricultural operations management. Using HYDRA, a semantic query engine for SADI Web services with a custom built graphical user interface, agricultural consultants can identify optimal crop varieties, and compute profit margins of each variety using a complex cost model.