The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is excited to announce the formation of the OGC Agriculture Information Model Standards Working Group (AIM SWG).
The purpose of the AIM SWG is to develop, publish, and maintain an Agriculture Information Model (AIM) to support interoperability of information in the Agriculture Domain, with emphasis on the re-use of generic OGC standards as appropriate.
AIM will provide a common language for agriculture applications to harmonize and improve data and metadata exchange by defining the required data elements, including concepts, properties, and relationships relevant to agriculture applications, as well as their associated semantics/meaning for information exchange.
AIM will be a multi-tier and modular domain model that aligns, profiles, and/or extends well known agriculture-related and generic ontologies, including those published by OGC. Publishing such a domain model as a modular ontology is a new and innovative approach. As such, the SWG will identify best practices for this approach, as well as develop a series of complementary models.
AIM will be published as both human and implementation-ready machine-actionable resources. Machine-actionable resources include the canonical ontology representation of the AIM in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) as well as other related artifacts to support implementation.
The SWG will develop implementations of the AIM model compatible with OGC APIs, including:
- JSON schemas supported by OGC APIs;
- JSON-LD contexts allowing identification and validation of AIM-compliant data; and
- SHACL shapes that enable the validation of data against AIM semantics.
In addition, other forms may be derived or supplied to support the reuse of the AIM model according to requirements identified by the SWG. For example:
- UML representation of the AIM conceptual model;
- UML representation of one or more logical models for AIM implementation; and
- Formal profiles for implementation of AIM using GeoJSON, FG-JSON, CoverageJSON, and other relevant generic schemas.
In line with OGC policies and FAIR principles, the AIM will be published using persistent and resolvable URI identifiers, consistent with OGC Naming Authority processes for publishing semantic resources.
OGC Members interested in staying up to date on the progress of the Agriculture Information Model, or contributing to its development, are encouraged to join the AIM SWG via the OGC Portal. Non-OGC members who would like to know more about participating in this SWG are encouraged to contact the OGC Standards Program.