Geospatial standards: An example from agriculture

Over the last 25 years, the evolution of geospatial standards has followed the practices in scientific and industry communities, while the sharing of data online became more and more efficient. However, adoption of the standards does not come without challenges that enable the standards to develop: (1) the cross-disciplinary integration including geoprocessing, requiring synergy between domains; (2) compatibility between national, regional and international e-infrastructures; and (3) efforts required to make possible data conflation from heterogeneous sources including crowdsourcing. The agriculture domain is used to illustrate these aspects of geospatial standard adoption throughout the discussion as a representative domain where applications of the standards address a multidisciplinary community. The agriculture domain is also a very dynamic domain with future challenges for geospatial standards arising from rapid developments of new technologies and practices used at different stakeholder levels such as smart farming, cloud computing and virtual research environments. The three big challenges described above can represent barriers or opportunities within each specific domain as well as for the standards in use themselves. It is hoped the chapter will help the reader to see them as opportunities for agriculture research, such as in monitoring or forecasting applications.