There are no options to add semantics to Shape files linking it in an ontology-based data network to represent and use it in an interoperable way for multiple sinks over a long period of time, which is necessary if resilience is considered.Also, the composition of several “part-files” complicates processing .Further important limitations of Shape files are listed in reflectsions of ESRI.The ISOXML format was not as popular as Shape files but gains increasing attention in all kinds of OEMs of the agricultural context.Its general use in between FMISs and machinery is foreseen by the definition of the ISO 11783 standard.In ISOXML, as a text-based format, field tasks are represented in a holistic manner realizing a complete planning and documentation.The format is very flexible and offers numerous options to integrate all kinds of elements, attributes for task application and documentation.In literature, few problems can be found around ISOXML itself.Nevertheless, during a validation of the function of an ISOBUS telemetric system Bauer et al. came across missing As-applied documentation, deviating values of set-point and as applied rates as well as offsets in time and space of the task application.These problems are not due to the format structure itself but reveal that providing a complete code can be challenging.Furthermore, farmers meet problems in the field reading ISOXML tasks on terminals with different software versions.In addition, farmers mostly task service providers to prepare application maps for example.In case of inconveniences for farmers, ISOXML is hard to browse eliminating wrong code.For complex polygons with an increasing number of way points,mobile vertical farm more powerful process capacities are necessary, which implies limitations for older terminals with low capacity micro controllers.

Another problem are the broad interpretations and inconsistent implementations of the ISOBUS standard.The ISOXML taskdata as-applied maps of two different fertilizer spreaders for example can look very different because of disparate interpretation and outraging the possibilities of the ISO 11783 standard by the OEMs.To include ISOXML in proprietary systems “Müller Elektronik” developed an ISOXML – to – Shapefifile converter.There is also an ISO plugin for format transformation in the AgGateway toolkit ADAPT.Furthermore, there is an ISOXML humanizer from the iGreen project which can help to get a better overview of ISOXMLs.In general, it is advantageous if collected data follow data models using international standards like RDF and OWL and the identification of data by IRIs.If data are described by a common vocabulary and structured in a unified manner they meet the FAIR principles which is necessary for long-term data use and storage like in the sector of agriculture.Using then ISOXML or JSON-LD , recommended by Goense for example, as data format, a solid documentation foundation is laid for sustainable data use, leveraging traceability and, data aggregation.Furthermore, these formats allow quick responses to programming commands.Consequently, OEMs might promote this by reducing proprietary interpretations and implementations within the standard of ISO 11783 to a minimum and avoid it concerning basic documentation data which are used by farmers in the daily work.Hence, M2M communication, especially in mixed fleets, can be realized on an international standard basis accomplishing interoperability.Data documentation on farms is manifold: It is obligatory in terms of government subsidy programs, it is beneficial for farm-specific management and economic calculations related to services and sales and it leads to increased knowledge about cultivated fields and hence decision support.To receive the EU subsidies, farmers need to fulfil obligations in environmental protection, human-, animal, and plant health and animal welfare in order to reach the goals of the common agricultural policy.Consequently, precise documentation in a digital way in these areas is increasingly practiced to fulfil the required obligations.

The application for CC subsidies in the state of Baden-Württemberg in Germany for example can be made only electronically.Also in England, rural payments are to be applied online.However, in a survey across Europe, it’s been shown that farmers conduct data documentation still by hand but also digitally or in combination, which leads to additional efforts for certain groups of farmers.Precision farming applications reduce outputs and realize sustainable management practices.The augmented use of corresponding PF applications gets honoured by increased subsidies.Based on the EU regulations, rural payments can be applied for when, for example, optical crop sensors are used in combination with the variable-rate application of N and P.Here fore, a digital “As-Applied” documentation including field data is necessary.Thus, in the sense of subsidized, sustainable agriculture, documentation efforts for farmers become financially and technically more significant.For small-scale farmers, this constitutes a technical challenge, which is mainly met by collaborating with contractors, inter farm machine use, or in so-called machinery rings.Furthermore, data handling constitutes a challenge because formats of data acquisition, processing, and digital application for subsidies may differ.A typical example is the case of billing for such precision farming services among farmers, farmers and machinery rings, and farmers and contractors.The data for fast and complete documentation for correct billing is available from high-tech machines and farmers’ fields.However, as many studies have shown, there is still a lack of connected and interoperable systems, which makes digital documentation and billing a complicated, time-consuming, and error-prone task.Therefore, especially small-scale farmers, often hesitate to invest in digital farming solutions because the latter might not pay off in the end.But in any case, these tools are needed for all farmers who want to operate a sustainable farm and get financial support from the government.Here, low-cost, interoperable, and open source solutions for digital farming are needed to include sustainable and high-quality producing small scale farms in the progress of digitization which also constitutes a worth protectable small-scaled rural agriculture.Data from objects, conditions, functions, and their relations are the basis of digital farming, knowledge-based, and data-driven agriculture.Farming developed over the history of humankind and accumulated knowledge on how to produce food.

With the rapid development in digitization and the exponential growth of collected and provided data the FAIR principals offer a sustainable guideline in order to have share and reusable data in the present and future.To ensure that sustainably ontologies are used.Gruber defines ontologies as an explicit specification of a conceptualization.That means the knowledge domain of agriculture as a whole would be described with standardized terminologies, relations, and derivations.The agreed vocabulary of the domain is organized in classes, relations, functions, and axioms and further describes details.Gruninger and Lee list three fields of application of ontologies: Communication, automatic reasoning and representation, and knowledge reuse.To learn from older data and build upon gained knowledge these functions are essential in digital farming.While there still occur complications in terms of interoperability in between digital devices for example of the international standard ISO11783 several activities take place to merge and clarify standards, terminologies, and data definitions, which might flow in the definitions of ISO 11783 .Mietzsch and Martini list 35 standards and standard groups reviewed within the EU project SmartAgriFood.They demand not to develop new standards but to focus standardization on generally applicable, cross-domain data structures where special content is represented in an interpretable way by machines.Furthermore, Martini and Schmitz suggest using RDF schemes which perform equally as XML schemes but offer a better overview while using a sixth of the volume.Maybe the most prominent source for ontologies is the AGROVOC by the FAO.In the linked data cloud, it is linked with over twenty other agricultural relevant data resources.The web addresses of the databases are identified by URI with a corresponding URL.To cover an even wider range of scripts IRIs are used to support non-ASCII characters in Web addresses.The database is in the RDF Format, clustered in triples which make it easy to transfer the data into a semantic web data model.Using the standard query language SPARQL the advantage of a single point of access is offered.For logical reasons it is recommended to make efforts to include non-RDF applications and models into today’s editing.Furthermore, several projects and activities aim to improve interoperability within the agri-food chain, connecting existing projects and industry solutions.Over the funding program Horizon2020 within the project DEMETER of the EU, a profound analysis of the State of the Art and State of practice has been conducted.It includes dominant systems like FIWARE , Agrifood, Saref4Agri , ADAPT, INSPIRE and FOODIE , AGROVOC, and EO data.The EU project ATLAS as well, which focuses on an open, distributed, and extensible data interoperability network.Ontologies of AGROVOC, CGIAR , GS1 , and ISO 11783 are referenced in the ATLAS project.The CGIAR has developed the AgrO building up on the ontologies of Crop Ontology and Planteome.In order to meet the need to host,vertical farming racks align and enable the use of many ontologies in agro informatics applications the LIRMM developed the Agroportal as a repository for numerous ontologies.Furthermore, KTBL in Germany works on standards, the Agricultural electronics section ISO/TC23/SC19 on ISO11783 and ADAPT in the USA and Europe.

Still the problem of overlapping vocabularies and constraints because of progressing developments and innovations stays and leaves the wish to cover the whole agricultural domain within one platform with ontologies in a flexible, expandable, and sustainable way.One attempt in this direction is the rmAgro/drmAgro initiated and maintained by the University of Wageningen.A reference is in development with a clear description and definition of classes of objects in agriculture.With the increasing amount of applications in agricultural practice and research which need internet connection, the importance of communication technology and infrastructure gets confirmed.Beyond GSM and UMTS , Villa-Henriksen summarized available options for wireless communication technologies.However, one of the most important complaints of farmers is a lack of network coverage, broadband supply, or even general network connection in rural areas.Berkes et al.found this problem for agricultural students concerning online lectures in Germany.Claver reports about a non-profit association in brazil which aims to bring 4G LTE with 700MHz broadband to rural areas because 70% of these do not have internet access.The 2- 4G coverage of each country, split up by network operating companies, can be evaluated on the GSMA webpage.In Germany, the Federal Network Agency provides a function to give detailed insights in network coverage per region, time span, and provider.For rural areas in most countries, internet supply is insufficient or at least very variable.In addition, blackouts and network disturbances are still common.Bökle et al. list some severe blackout occasions which affect network supply.German telecommunication providers accumulate between 30 and 400 disturbances within one week.The BNA counted from 2017 to 2019 1830 landline and 1317 mobile network failures which couldn’t be solved by the providers themselves and remained on average 34 days.Most of these severe incidents served by the BNA are located in urban areas.Nevertheless, rural areas, where farmers are, are also affected and additionally show a poor supply of broadband communication also in Europe as well as in the US which makes their internet supply even more vulnerable.To cover remote fields of a farm John Deere developed a solution for rural connectivity for the Brazilian market.The Mobile Comm Center/ Smart Vehicle Terminal can be transferred via tractor to the remote fields.It is a mobile repeater of stationary or mobile signals for LTE and 5G networks.It has a range from 4 – 40km depending on the required bandwidth/ frequency.Another possibility to overcome the rural lack of communication technology is described by Franchi from the project “Experimentierfeld LANDNETZ”.So-called MCNs enable a local 5G network for applications in real-time, like the processing of a prescription map simultaneously to a site-specific fertilizer application.To cover a wider area also for small-scaled farmers with wider spacing in between single fields 5G mesh networks can be installed using mobile agricultural campus networks.This mobile solution, mounted on a car trailer, includes next to 5G a WiFi6, a LoRaWAN network, and an edge cloud for data processing.Internet connection is established via LTE, LTE-M , NB-IoT , or satellite communication.SpaceX developed Starlink, which launched publicly with a beta version in October 2020.The concept wants to cover remote areas with broadband internet and low latency launching in the end 42000 satellites in the orbit.Due to the development state of Starlink connectivity interruptions are still possible.Also, temperature problems of the satellite dish still have to be encountered.Asking farmers about data sharing one perceives a certain scepticism.In a European survey, most farmers see in the lack of data security the highest risk in digitization.