An infrastructure for the development of distributed service-oriented information systems for precision agriculture

Precision agriculture (PA) involves using electronic technology to collect a large amount of data in the field for use in site-specific crop management. Major issues in the implementation of PA include interpreting the huge amount of data collected, understanding the causes of variability, and being able to propose sound strategies for field variability management. To help address these issues, a software infrastructure is proposed. It adopts concepts from software engineering with the aim of providing a basis for the development of information systems for PA based on open platforms, and on data communication and software interoperability standards. The infrastructure has two main components and a reference architecture for the development of distributed service-oriented systems. This paper presents and discusses the infrastructure and its components and presents a prototype application named yield data filtering, which filters yield monitor data and was developed as a proof of concept. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.