SaaS World 2007: Farming 2.0 in Hiroshima

Award for longest organisation name at the event goes to ReFits Lab from Fukuyama - better known as 独立行政法人農業・食品産業技術総合研究機構 近畿中国四国農業研究センター 生産支援システム研究近中四サブチーム (The National Agriculture and Food Research Organization - National Agricultural Research Center for Western Region - Decision Support Research Sub-team - think I need a cup of tea and a lie down after that mouthful!)

Tongue-twisters aside, Teramoto-san and his team from said lab are into their mashups, and were showing off a couple -  based on an API for their own local climate data overlaid on Google Maps - at the Mashup Corner.

Rice Growth Prediction System

Early on in the growing season, navigate to your location on a Google Map, input the number of leaves on your young rice seedlings, and the system will predicts the expected yield for that crop.

Vegetable Optimisation System

Using the above APIs and vegetable growth indices, input a date and location, and it will tell you the harvest time and likely yield, or input a harvest date, and it will tell you when to plant.

Spin offs

Having access to government data - such as the formulas to calculate plant growth - has also allowed them to easily create added-value API services that they have subsequently made public.  Additionally, they needed a reverse-geocoding API - where you input coordinates and it returns an address - which is not available from Google, so they guys rolled their own from a publicly available government dataset, and made that available through their site too.

Issues they face

As strange as it may seem, not all in the Agriculture bureaucracy are as gung ho on Web 2.0 as these guys are (who knew?!).  They receive little support or encouragement for the initiative, even though it has grown into a popular service - especially the geocoding extras.

And as end user expectations does not match up with the resources available, the service uptime is not optimal, generating complaints from users.  Of course, being a mashup of two services, if one service goes down, the whole system fails. Also, there is no guarantee when or if some of their third party datasets will be updated.

Post session chat

After the presentation, I chatted with Teramoto-san and Kentarou Ishimaru from Goga Inc and the impression was that the Japanese government is sitting on a gold mine of sleeping data, but closed-mindedness and constant restructuring is hampering wider use of the data.  I joked that they should close down some of the government departments, and just leave the APIs! ;)

In spite of the various challenges, the team are right into this new way ... through efforts such as this, it seems that people are awakening to the fact that Web 2.0 technologies are as relevant and helpful on the farm as they are in the office!