An overview of the variety of standards relevant to the agrifood sector. Presentation given at EFITA 2017, Montpelier, France

1. The landscape of agrifood
data standards: From
ontologies to messages
Christopher Brewster
TNO, The Netherlands
1

2. Purpose of this talk
‣ Delineate three communities: research community, precision
agriculture/smart farming community, and supply chain
community
‣ Describe two types of standards: Messaging Standards and
Ontological Standards
‣ Argue that given the digitisation of agriculture and the food
system, there needs to be greater integration and interoperability
‣ Based on on-going research to develop a critical assessment of
agrifood standards
2

3. Types of Data Standards
‣ Messaging standards
‣ Mostly purely syntactic standards e.g. XML
‣ Usually about an “event” or time related
information
‣ Examples include EDIFACT and GS1 EPCIS
3

4. Types of Data Standards
‣ Ontological Standards
‣ Usually provide a syntax and semantics (of
varying formality)
‣ Usually used to describe attributes or states
‣ Examples include AGROVOC, GACS, various
CROP related Ontologies to annotate genomic
data

5. Types of Data Standards
‣ Identification standards
‣ These are really ontological standards - just very
simple ontologies
‣ Usually purely syntactic, usually used just to look
up data
‣ Most important examples are ISO 11784 for
animal identification, and GS1 GTIN (EAN/UPC
barcodes)

6. Three communities: Research
‣ Mostly academics with a sprinkling of commercial
participants
‣ Major focus on ontologies intended to be used to
annotate publications and research data
‣ Best known examples are AGROVOC, GACS,
NALT, recent example is FOODON

7. Three communities: Farming
‣ Largely dominated by farm machinery
manufacturers (such as John Deere, Claas,
Kvernaland etc.)
‣ Messaging standards for machinery (ISOBUS) and
Smart Farming (XML standards from AgGateway)
‣ Best known examples include ISOBUS,
AgGateway, some cross-overs e.g. AgroXML/
AgroRDF

8. Three Communities: Supply Chain
‣ Dominated by CEFACT (a UN organisation) and
GS1 (a trade association)
‣ Both focus on XML based messaging standards
with limited semantics
‣ Examples include: EDIFACT (for EDI messages),
and EPCIS (for supply chain events)

9. The landscape

10. Barriers to greater Integration
‣ Psychological barriers - not invented here syndrome
‣ Business incentives - lack of. Few success stories, perhaps
Floricode
‣ Cultural isolation - some national standards which do not
spread - Germany, France and Netherlands all have
examples
‣ Competition - multiple standards for the same sub-area
‣ None of these are unique to agrifood

11. Digitisation of Agrifood
‣ The substantial growth of “digitisation of agriculture”
is frustrated by confusion over standards
‣ Great opportunities to link the research domain with
actual agricultural production - can this happen?
‣ Huge need for greater data visibility in supply chain
- this cannot happen without agreed data models.
‣ How do we bridge these communities and their
standards?

12. Thank you
https://xkcd.com/927/