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Conversation with Kevin Dwayne Brown of COMET-Farm - Aug 8

Conversation with Kevin Dwayne Brown of COMET-Farm - Aug 8

In attendance: Kevin Cussen, Greg Bathree, Shubleen, Mathieu

Background: https://lite-farm.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/LITEFARM/pages/1338900481, https://lite-farm.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/LITEFARM/pages/1336213528

 

Kevin Dwayne Brown - Been working on COMET-Farm and Daycent for 15 years. Prof has been on it for 35 years. Just released a new version of the model. Comes out every 5 years or so. COMET-Farm is the “latest greatest science” - not necesarily the technology or interface. Want to make it as open as possible via the API.

Better idea to de-couple as much as possible … We should be able to do the integration regardless of whether COMET is going to limit commercial or enterprise runs.

Always need the soil map unit for a relevant plot - a point or polygon - but external service could be able to do that as well.

I gave a bit of a background on LiteFarm …

 

CSU has a portfolio:

  • COMET-Farm: Production

  • COMET-Farm Global: No timeline, in development (maybe 2 years out).

  • http://comet-planner.com/: (production) is required for climate smart money. I gather there’s a fair bit of politicking about this. For this model, it’s 3 click to get a quick estimate. The work here was to pre-run the model on many core permutations - for example size of land and management method.

  • https://comet-planner-global.com/: (beta) - much lighter weight planning tool for farms outside the USA. Depends on conservation practice list from USDA. Just the UI right now, but could be made available via API with enough prodding.

 

Update on the switchboard:

https://gitlab.com/our-sci/software/json_schema_distribution

very un-opinionated. Required fields are very minimal.

Each team will then constrain that original schema to something that has enough information to be understood by their own system. For example, COMET-Farm might say that a tillage event needs to reference a location described with a polygon. For any tools that need to integrate with another tool the handshake would look like:

  1. Take data available on source system and based on pre-understood defintions of constraints on the destination system, massage the data to meet those constraints

  2. Send the source system data that meets the constraints of the destination system in the source system format to the switchboard. The switchboard already has a definition of how to get from the source system to the generic format and from the generic format to the destination format.

  3. Switchboard converts the source system data into the destination system format and replies to the source system with that converted json

  4. Source system sends that converted data directly to the destination system in the destination system format

  5. Destination system replies with outputs

Sent this to Greg afterwords to confirm my understanding:

 

Questions:

 

Unavailable outside the US - why?

 

COMET-Farm vs. Carbon Benefits Project?

 

API limit of 50 per day - use case for LiteFarm?

 

API - currently handles xml - plans moving forward?