Formal representation of agricultural production standards
Edward L. Nash, Jens Wiebensohn, Raimo Nikkilä, Anna Vatsanidou, Spyros Fountas · 2010
Production standards in the form of legal regulations or quality assurance labels are playing an increasingly important role in farming. Each farm must therefore gather information on all standards which apply, which may vary from field-to-field, and ensure that they are respected during operations. This information may be provided on paper or as electronic documents, by the standards publishers or by advisors. Together with the need to document compliance, the need to collect and process the requirements is becoming increasingly burdensome for farmers. In order to provide assistance, it is proposed that a machine-readable formal representation of standards be used. As an initial step, a general model of production standards was developed and applied to some common standards in European agriculture. Based on this model, separating standards into metadata and a list of individual rules (check points), a formal representation was developed. This uses elements from Dublin Core and OGC Geography Markup Language for representing the metadata, and W3C Rules Interchange Format and Web Ontology Language for representing the rules in a fully machine-readable form. Each rule is also additionally included in its original natural-language form, together with metadata indicating which field operations it regulates and what data is required for assessing compliance. In the first instance, this allows simple software to automatically generate a single checklist from all appropriate standards for manual use. More advanced software may use the machine-readable part to automate compliance checking. This paper describes the representation, its design rationale, and provides examples of its usage.