Data Infrastructures in Agriculture - Attempts at Interoperability

Agriculture presents itself as an interesting conglomerate of different domains. It is an intersection of a bunch of natural sciences like biology, chemistry, geography with business, legal and political issues. As diverse as the disciplines involved in agriculture are the demands on data management and exchange. This poses a special challenge on interoperability of data formats and services. Additional requirements arise from the size and structure of enterprises involved in farming and in provision of farm management information systems. From our work in agricultural data exchange, we present experiences and try to derive how data standards touching this domain should develop to allow for future interoperability.