Big Data and precision agriculture: a novel spatio-temporal semantic IoT data management framework for improved interoperability

Abstract

Precision agriculture in the realm of the Internet of Things is characterized by the collection of data from multiple sensors deployed on the farm. These data present a spatial, temporal, and semantic characterization, which further complicates the performance in the management and implementation of models and repositories. In turn, the lack of standards is reflected in insufficient interoperability between management solutions and other non-native services in the framework. In this paper, an innovative system for spatio-temporal semantic data management is proposed. It includes a data query system that allows farmers and users to solve queries daily, as well as feed decision-making, monitoring, and task automation solutions. In the proposal, a solution is provided to ensure service interoperability and is validated against two European smart farming platforms, namely AFarCloud and DEMETER. For the evaluation and validation of the proposed framework, a neural network is implemented, fed through STSDaMaS for training and validation, to provide accurate forecasts for the harvest and baling of forage legume crops for livestock feeding. As a result of the evaluation for the training and execution of neural networks, high performance on complex spatio-temporal semantic queries is exposed. The paper concludes with a distributed framework for managing complex spatio-temporal semantic data by offering service interoperability through data integration to external agricultural data models. Graphical Abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.]