Information Systems

Advance the development and effective use of information and communication technologies in all areas of agriculture in order to increase its sustainability, quality of operations and produce, productivity and profitability of the businesses. Target those technologies to every link of the production chains, education, research and policy making.

Mission:

The mission of Section VII is to advance the use of information and communication technologies to harness optimal farm management and food supply chain, achieving sustainable agriculture. The sustainability includes productivity, profitability, environmental harmonization, robustness against climatic change, food security, food safety, food quality and farm welfare. ICT should be utilized in almost all the fields in CIGR and interdisciplinary collaborations are particularly important in the Section VII activities.

Objectives:

Section VII aims to promote people to achieve the following targets through maximally utilizing most up-to-date ICT;

• Policy making of ICT-based sustainable agriculture and rural development for green economy
• Enhancement of e-education/training and communication tools to effectively transfer technologies to farmers and to solve the last one mile issue.
• Enhancement of data acquisitions and development and sharing with efficient tool supports
• Enhancement of data integration for agricultural big data based on interoperable data standardization
• Enhancement of data and model integrations for effective decision supports
• Enhancement of DSS development for farmers, extension staffs, policy makers and distributors
• Enhancement of R&D of basic technologies and tools adaptable to ICT applications in agriculture

Scope:

The scope of Section VII is broad covering:

• Policy
  • ICT policies for sustainable rural development, ICT adoption in rural community, e-government, e-agribusiness based on green economy ,
• Data content development
  • agricultural resources data banks, market information, weather information, soil information, technology information, digital library, intellectual property, big data cloud
  • Privacy security and data quality
  • Interoperable data exchange platform and cloud
• Applications
  • decision support system, precision farming, sensors, knowledge management system, GAP support system, traceability system, e-learning/training system, extension service
  • Maximum utilization of big data and IOT
• Technology
  • data/text/Web mining, machine learning, cloud computing, social media/Web technologies, metadata, standards and cataloging, taxonomy, ontology and the semantic Web, information retrieval, open source tools, sensor network, sensors, Grid, human-computer interaction, mobile services, remote sensing, GIS, pattern recognition, image analysis, modeling, security

Activities:

To achieve the objectives, Section VII promotes the collaborations among related groups, providing opportunities to discuss and exchange information among them. The main activities of Section VII are to organize sessions and workshops collaborating with several organizations which have the similar aims in terms of the utilization of ICT in agriculture.

• Section VII co-organizes WCCA (World Congress of Computer in Agriculture) as a member of INFITA (International Network of Federations of Information Technology in Agriculture, http://www.infita.org/). A WCCA takes place annually synchronously with one of the international conferences organized by one of the INFITA members.
• Section VII organizes sessions and workshops on specific topics during the CIGR conferences
• Section VII co-organizes workshops and sessions in several related conferences and meetings