OPEN DATA - A Catalyst For Innovations In Agriculture

The Agriculture OpenData project is an ongoing research initiative being conducted by the MSB Centre of Excellence in collaboration with the Rural Agricultural Development Agency (RADA) in the  Ministry of Agriculture. It seeks to demonstrate the possibilities and opportunities associated with extending the accessibility, reach and utility of several of the Ministry's significant data resources through OpenData Web-services. Some of these Key Data Sources include:

ABIS - Agricultural Business Information System that stores farm registration and agriculture production data.
JAMIS -  Jamaica Agriculture Market Information  System  that provides pricing data of agricultural commodities 
 
Some of the interesting and innovative Agriculture Apps developed include:

Visualization Application
This web-based application demonstrates how geospatial agriculture data can be made more meaningful, accessible and user friendly. The application allows the user to view farm and crop data island-wide on a map basis. Query and aggregate functions also enable data to be summarized as both Bar and Pie charts, run complex queries and receive real time results in either a tabular or map view.
 
Microfinance Loan Management
A demonstration prototype of an application that illustrates how OpenData can improve the efficiency of value-chain microfinance loan processing that could benefit small farmers. This application enables a Microfinance Institution to evaluate a farmer's loan application by querying the OpenData Web-service with his Registration ID and retrieving information on his farm property as well as crop production history, which  provides a quasi-agricultural collateral.
 
The AgroAssistant
With a penetration of close to 100% in Jamaica, the mobile phone is rapidly becoming the platform of choice for access to, and dissemination of digital content and presents significant      opportunities for extending the potential reach and impact of Open Data.
 
The AgroAssistant is a companion mobile application developed to extend the capabilities of the Agriculture OpenData web-service. This application for the  Android1Smartphone provides the RADA field officers with remote decision support and information access to the both aggregate and individual agriculture data stored within the API. 
 
Functionality includes:
On-demand data access to the farm, crop and price information stored in the Agriculture API
Location-based searching: An extension officer is able to look up farmer, price or crop information within a geographical area or using the   Android's built-in GPS device.
Remote data entry: Update farmer records, such as the location of a farmer's property or crop production information.