INFORMATION SYSTEMS IN MANAGEMENT V - SGGW

7. STARTING POINT
Every journey starts from the first step and even if one knows where to go, one
should know where one is.
Agricultural technology knowledge.
A specialized database to store the agricultural technology knowledge required
by linear models of farms has been available since 2005 [Mazurkiewicz2007],
[Mazurkiewicz2005]. It is a good starting point despite the necessary adjustments
to the particular requirements of IBP.
Another issue is standards and agricultural meta-data setting. There are, more
or less established, standards for XML data exchange and information management.
That area is addressed by the FAO AIMS initiative (Agricultural Information
Management Standards). In Germany, the main initiative is AgroXML, in France
agroEDI. There are also specialized industry standards. The CRISTAL standard
[CRISTAL] has emerged because of the needs of crop protection companies. However
further work on standardization of agricultural terms has to be carried out.
Financial knowledge
Financial knowledge consists of a set of procedures to generate balance sheets,
profit and loss documents and cash-flow statements. A lot of information including
legal documents is available within this area.
Market knowledge and predictions
As a starting point, a simple linear piecewise prediction function of expected
prices can be arranged as farmer's knowledge, similarly to the solution of
[Mazurkiewicz2005].
The forecasts of prices of agricultural products are also prepared by the Instytut
Ekonomiki Rolnictwa i Gospodarki Żywnościowej in Warsaw.
Current state of the farm
A starting framework for the current state of the farm is available from [Mazurkiewicz2005].
It needs adjustments to contain financial data.
Investment information
Investment can be considered to be a set of fixed resources, together with their
availability and payment schedules.
Models generation
Algorithms for the generation of the final goal models have been published by
[Mazurkiewicz2007]. They do not cover the area of risk management in agriculture.
This is an area for future work.
Algorithms for generation of the goal-reaching model are not available and are
subject for further work.
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