Evaluation of XML-Formatted Farming-systems Data

Abstract

Each local government in Japan individually publishes farming-systems data, which describe when to plant particular crops and what cultivation and protective measures should be used. Forms of these data differ between local governments. Moreover, each entry in the form of farming-systems data has varying styles of descriptions and varying notations depending on the person who generated the data. This kind of heterogeneity prevents farm planning systems from importing farming-systems data. To deal with this heterogeneity, we have tried to use XML as a format of farming-systems data. XML is a promising tool for sharing distributed and heterogeneous data.
We have transformed a booklet of farming-systems into XML-formatted electronic data. The booklet is issued by Iwate prefecture, and consists of 149 tables. Each table in the booklet that corresponds to a crop or its cropping type has been converted to one or more XML-formatted text files.
We have also developed prototype applications that are able to interpret XML formatted files of farming-systems data. The process for comparing these applications with an existing relational database based “Farming-systems Analysis and Planning Support Database” revealed that we could retrieve data one needs from XML-formatted files as easily as we could retrieve the data from the relational database based system. We tested whether XML-formatted files of farming-systems data could be stored in a native XML database. There was no trouble in storing XML-formatted files of farming-systems data in the native XML database.