Federating and Harmonising Disparate Soil Moisture Data Sources

As with many industries, digital disruption will play a major role in shaping agriculture over the coming years as decisions become increasingly data driven. A significant proportion of this data will come from on-farm sensors that are becoming easier to source and deploy. While access to sensors is becoming increasingly cost effective, accessing and integrating the data they provide is still a major issue for many, due to the use of different standards for describing and sharing the data. The Soil sensing - new technology for tracking soil water availability, managing risk and improving management decisions project has developed a distributed system that addresses the technical challenge of federating disparate data sources through the use of a software mediation layer and a semantically enabled metadata harvest, search and discovery tool. These web services, the O&M Translator and the Data Brokering Layer, allow a unified and federated view of the data, enabling integrated search and discovery and provide access through a SOS compliant API, delivering the data to client using the O&M data model and a TimeseriesML representation. The resulting Data Stream Integrator is already being tested in applications such as SoilWaterApp.