Field ICT Project

New ICT Application to Agriculture

　In decision-making and problem-solving in agriculture, it's necessary to properly understand the status quo such as a plant growing process in a field. Based on its understandings, it's also important to predict uncertain elements like future disturbance and to make final decisions.
　The appropriate understanding of the status quo highly depends on Data-Sensing Technology, which enables the proper and rapid acquisition of necessary data. In short, developing Data-Sensing infrastructure is effective to promote and stabilize the sustainable and high quality production of agricultural products.
　 ALFAE will promote the ICT application in a field, which inherits from Optical Sensing Farming, developed by the Database Mining project (1999-2001) and the Collaborative System Project(2201-2005), and the accompanying Optical Sensing Systems.

ALFAE develops the New Agricultural Technology.

In MAFF IT Project, the systems such as

  • Optical Sensing System from X-ray to Infrared Ray
  • Sensor Data-Mining and Analysis System
  • P2P networks for accumulated information exchange
  • Standard XML format (Bio Information eXchange: BIX) for sensing data exchange

have been developed into BIX Project, which is accompanied with Sensing Project in collaboration with ‘Field Server' developed by NARC and ‘Met Broker‘, a weather data acquisition system.
This BIX project aims at constructing the systems that anyone can easily use anywhere. Therefore, it promotes to measure and acquire various onsite information from a field, using portable sensors mainly based on optic techniques (from X-ray to Infrared rays), and to handle these biological and environmental information by standard XML format.
　Utilizing these systems will make a wide range of achievements, which are standardization of agricultural products, food safety and security, traceability, quality improvement such as flavor quality, human resource development of farmers and so on.