Conventions Call - 2024.11.21

Conventions
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Date: 11/21/2024
Attendees: Rose, Garethe, @gbathree, @julietnpn

A newcomer wonders, what exactly is the Common Farm Convention? There a lot of different conventions. What makes this one different?
It seems to be a structure to hold different vocabularies.

Semantics world explanation of the Common Farm Convention from Rose:

  • A JSON based structure that will hold its data interoperability standard.

    • You can put your data into it and put it into other systems in an interoperable way so that it is not lossy.
    • You won’t loose your granularity.

  • The structure comes from an activities perspective

    • You have your farm management activities that you put into your standard
    • The key is that it is based on farm activity.

  • It is a set of rules that connect farm-activity concepts together.

    • There is logic that you run on it so when you validate it its upholding it to the standards
    • There are rules that connect the things together so you can use it as a JSON to make API calls for example, but really whatever you want.

  • You can put any input data (from a producer/ farm) you can put in to the common farm form.

    • Rose can show how to put data into that form

… in execution:

  • I have a collection of conventions that is for my farm.
  • I’m using it for farm management activities
  • I have the convention irrigation to describe the irrigation event
  • I have the convention mowing

You can change the conventions to make children of them to fit whatever kind of granularity you need.

Garethe’s summary / takeway:
Generic logical model (kind of) or like event model that you’re imposing different schemas on this, different classes of events on it effectively.

Continued Conversation

You can nest conventions. You want a collection of events to describe a specific context. There are base conventions that are high level and you can make children that are more specific.

  • Roll ups and roll down to find more detail.

More of an analytical tool than a transactional tool?

  • There are a lot of challenges to interoperability, and this addresses some of those.

How does the common farm convention prevent data loss?

  • When you transfer data, especially when you have to deal with units and especially groups of units.
  • A lot of times a schema makes you conform you data in a specific way, but a flexible schema allows you to put it in the data that works for you and allows it to be rolled up in appropriate way, specifying when data is needed but

Information from Garethe
RDF is a ontology based standard
DFC context is local local food systems and bringing them to markets
Had conversations with Kevin at Lite Farm, Mike and Greg

Logical next steps is getting some of those farm management apps that are in this space.

It makes a lot of sense to make DFC into common farm convention.

LDP - Linked data platforms
RDF - Resource Description Framework
DFC - Data Food Consortium

Greg wants Cory’s perspective - maybe there is some tooling out there that has addressed some of the merging we’d have to do to go from what we have to RDF.

What we’re missing in the common farm convention:

  • Lists are really important. We just embed lists directly into the convention using json schema
  • Tis practical but not good
  • In a perfect world we’d reference an ontology
  • we should utilize ontologies to do conversions. There are javascript libraries that connect to them.

Lite farm and farmos do custom units (e.g., bushels is the classic example)

The hard thing about rdf is being forced into a subject-object-structure format

Vocbench: VocBench: A Collaborative Management System for OWL ontologies, SKOS(/XL) thesauri, Ontolex-lemon lexicons and generic RDF datasets
Their voc dataset: ShowVoc
https://qudt.org/

Pros and Cons of convention frameworks

  • Maturity
  • Growth
  • Scale

Common Farm Convention + DFC considered working on a grant
It didn’t end up going, but here are some deets:

  • Next Generation Internet Fund

    • Billions of Euros over about 5 years
    • EU are funding european based projects to foster next generation internet stuff
    • R&D for internet and computers
    • You have to have a NA partner
    • The NA partner gets match funding from somewhere

  • DFC Ag Data Wallet App

  • Research question: can you do inventory management in farmOS and have inventory changes be reflected in OFN with the data protocol between the two be DFC and Solid compliant?

  • Resources:

what is Solid? is it web 3.0?

  • Web 3.0 → blockchain
  • solid doesn’t have blockchain
  • logical extension of the semantic web to the idea that data stores are being
  • solid is looking at centralized rather than decentralized? @gbathree is this true? I might have misunderstood that.
  • not obvious that it is 300 websites versus one website
  • self hosted and centralized hosted s3 buckets
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Welcome to the forum @julietnpn! You should be able to post now. :slight_smile:

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Thanks :slight_smile:

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