Automated multi-system data integration implementing a novel data ecosystem: a fruit grading case study in horticulture research

Sophisticated sensor systems are increasingly becoming integral in horticulture research experiments supporting data collection for experimental units and samples. These sensors may not always be deployed in situ within an experiment and, in some cases, are used to take measurements on samples at facilities that may be remote to the experimental orchard. An example is the measurement of fruit quality using a fruit grading system. Currently, the critical linkage of this sample data to an orchard feature such as a plot, tree or individual fruit is primarily done manually and lacks flexibility and precision. This affects research efficiency and creates issues in maintaining research data quality, precision, and resolution. There is a need to improve and automate data integration across systems to help the researchers increase efficiency in data collection and retain data resolution, whether collected from a plot, tree or individual fruit, while enhancing later analysis. This paper presents a use case study for the application of a research data ecosystem model, recently developed in the Agriculture Victoria Research, to automatically integrate multi-sensor data from a fruit grader with experimental design data from Tatura SmartFarm research orchard in Victoria, Australia. Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is used to identify and tag experimental units and containers and is coupled with a traceability subsystem within the data ecosystem to enable the connection of a container loaded at the grader back to an orchard feature (i.e., tree). An application was developed to coordinate these processes and associate fruit quality parameters estimated from the sensor systems with the orchard feature identifier to allow data linkage. This use case provides an exemplar model to enable linkage between fruit grading data at a processor and the commercial orchard features for production reporting and traceability.