The agriculture area is divided into several districts, with each
equipped with a plant and soil sample analysis extension service
responsible for the corresponding district. This mode facilitates
users (usually farmers) since they don’t need to cover a long
way to send soil or plant samples to the service for chemical or
physical analysis, which avoid delaying in implementing
decision recommendations. Any farm-level field can be
recommended with appropriate ways of field management (as
fertilizer application, water irrigation, or herbicide application,
etc.) made by GZ-AgriGIS. As the decision is made based on
specialist knowledge and models gathered from experts or
literatures, it has more credibility than that made by an
individual farmer experience.
There is two ways that prompt the system to make the decision
process. One is for user to offer ID number of a farm field or the
user can select a farm field or a region that contains series of
farm fields based on digital map. The system will then prompt a
list of variables some of which have been stored in database
while others may require new input through graphic user
interface. In this case, we demonstrate the decision made on
fertilizer application (nitrogen application). The user selects a
region by drawing a selecting box on the digital map, and this
operation will highlight the selected fields and return the
selected field IDs. Some basic data as field location, field soil
type or some constant data can directly retrieved from the
system database while others that are more transient such as soil
water content, active nitrogen content have to be input by user.
The system then will use those data, supported by analysis
models and domain knowledge, to give an understandable
decision result. Take nitrogen application as an example. Some
factors that affect nitrogen application of the spatial decision
unit should be input from user or retrieved from system
database, then appropriate fertilizer type as well as the amount
of the fertilizer that should be applied will be calculated by
fertilizer application models and crop requirement knowledge.
As some fields may lack data or some crop need knowledge
may lack, lacking information or lacking knowledge will be
returned to user