Big data technologies for agricultural information and sensor systems
Szármes Péter
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Széchenyi István Egyetem
Élö Gábor Dr.
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Széchenyi István Egyetem
Precision agriculture is an integrated agricultural management system incorporating several technologies. The technological tools often include the global positioning system, geographical information system, variable rate technology and sensor systems. This technology can reduce the cost of producing crops and the risk of environmental pollution.
The AgroDat R&D project with notable industrial and scientific partners aims to build an agricultural information system in Hungary. The system depends on collecting and analysing high-volume data about crops and environmental conditions like soil moisture and temperature, air temperature, precipitation, solar radiation, etc.
Much of the data can be collected by sensor networks, which make measurements even on a minute-rate and in many locations. The design of sensor stations has already started, energy consumption and network communication are the main challenges. Primary data from the sensors will be sent via GSM networks onto central servers. The project requires custom-built computers, which have fast storage components, can hold large amount of data and support CPU-intensive as well as distributed calculations.
Various analytical algorithms will forecast crop diseases, determine irrigation needs and suggest appropriate actions for the given field. We have to create a rule-based expert system incorporating agricultural knowledge and use pattern recognition and visualization tools to discover hidden relationships. By semantic search relevant studies will also be collected from agricultural databases (as secondary sources) and a web portal will be used to share all the information with users.