Agromapas, Geospatial Platform for rural affairs in Colombia

Diego Fabian Pajarito Grajales Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs

Agronet Bogotá, Colombia

diego.pajarito@minagricultura.gov.co

Abstract— Agronet is the most important information technology program of the Colombian Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development - MADR and has been awarded by the Colombian e-government program in 2012 (ExcelGEL2012 Award) for the improvement on data accessibility reached with its multiple communication ways like the internet portal, SMS messages and web maps. Agronet is held by the MADR and was conceived in 2005 as a network that allows different organizations to report and query the most relevant agricultural and livestock information as an UN-FAO initiative oriented to researchers, managers, planners and policy makers. Agronet grew in organizational arrangements and technology platform improving the amount and quality of information available. In the last three years this improvement has been supported also by geoinformatics represented in a module called “Agromapas” that offers more than ten different data sources of spatial data. Agromapas is used most of the time as a web map application that let users to query and analyze spatial patterns of agricultural indicators like coverage and clustering, those maps complements other tools available on the portal like reports tables and graphs, and bring users alternatives to simplify the dynamics comprehension of the last thirty years of agriculture and livestock in Colombia with an user oriented interface. All this functionality is supported by different technologies like PostGIS, Geoserver, OpenLayers and google maps, integrated via Java RESTful Web Services, Javascript and GeoExt interfaces. This tools arrangement let users to explore and analyze the dynamics of crop area, production, livestock inventory, climate and rural policy impact in the past 30 years, supporting the Agronet initiative of serving thirty five data sources of agriculture and livestock together and going beyond on building a node of geospatial information. Agronet and the MADR in 2014 are designing and implementing the Colombian spatial data infrastructure - ICDE agricultural node, as an arrangement of policies, standards, hardware and software that will improve the Agromapas Initiative and the adoption of geospatial technology in related organizations, first step on this strategy is the adjustment and certification of data and discovery services via WCS, WMS, WFS with temporal support. Being part of ICDE and leading those activities Agromapas tries to build an ecosystem of agricultural and livestock information complemented with social, economic and environmental data to support national decision making processes and policy formulation. Colombia nowadays looks back to rural affairs and realizes that rural population need and important change on their production activities and some policies demand information analysis from multiple sources. Besides this activities, Agronet Experience has been shared to advise some other dependencies,

especially on collecting spatial data, building spatial indicators, publishing maps on Agromapas and bringing users additional analysis tools. Nowadays when lack of IT appropriation across MADR and related organizations is evident and when stakeholders, policy formulators and citizens needs include spatial analysis the tools offered by Agromapas became more essential than important.

Keywords— Agriculture; Agronet; Geo-Information; Web Mapping; Spatial Data Infrastructure

I. INTRODUCTION Policy making is commonly considered as a non-technical

activity, in Colombia policies for agriculture have also considered as lawyers and economists tasks. In the beginning of the decade a group of technicians and analysts decided to support this activity with information and communication technology and created Agronet. Today it is considered the biggest information network on agriculture where the most important data sources are available. As a dynamic initiative this network is constantly looking forward considering new and better analysis and visualization tools like reports, charts, tables, and even written texts as short messages on mobile phones, one of those alternatives selected to improve the way that users can obtain and use data is web mapping and its integration with the web portal has been an important task in the latest three years. This paper describes the beginning of Agromapas, its initial users’ requirements, the challenging evolution from a simple web map application to a geospatial platform that will support the agricultural node of the Colombian spatial data infrastructure, the design process and the technical details that make it the most important geospatial platform that brings access and geo-visualization tools to the spatial-enabled indicators of the sector.

II. AN ECONOMIC SECTOR FULL OF DATA NEEDS Data analyst and policy makers from the Colombian

Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs - MADR were still dealing with the difficult task of searching data inside documents, lockers, and probably files in computers in the early years of twenty first century. Were they living in a different world? Where they just unplugged of the young internet world? Or were they just late on the information world? Agronet was conceived within this chaotic situation and was motivated by professionals both of MADR and the Food

and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations -FAO [1]. They were convinced that a tool that make available Agricultural data and information from rural sector in Colombia was possible, and designed it to be supported by an organizations network that could connect data sources with users as simple as possible for those that does not have neither technical knowledge nor access tools so they do not take informed decisions.

From those years the Agronet improvement is huge, now the network is recognized as an efficient tool by all policy makers from all government levels, technicians, academics, union leaders and general citizens. And is considered as a referent for most of the actors of the Colombian agricultural sector. All of them are able to interact with Agronet via web portal, web learning platform, television spots, personal teaching sessions around Colombia, even text messages to subscribed phones via the Celuagronet program. Through any of those options users can receive information related to public policies, events, best practices, new courses, credit alternatives and much more.

In 2012, considering the impact of this pull of strategies the Colombian e-gobernment program called “Gobierno en Línea” gave a special recognition to Agronet and awarded the Celuagronet program as the best mobile application for e-government procedures [2]. This award is just one of the most relevant issues in Agronet history and shows the relevance of its initiatives in both the agricultural and information and technology sectors.

III. AGROMAPAS FOR SPATIAL DATA MANAGEMENT Needs of visualization and analysis within the web portal

were initially covered by traditional tables, bars and pie charts; users demanded additional options and the Agronet team found necessary to think about different tools then maps came out. In 2011 was born “Agromapas” conceived initially as a geographic information system - GIS tool for compiling spatial data and displaying spatially enabled indicators. Its first version was a massive GIS layer container wrapped in a web app, very appreciated by agricultural GIS technicians but unusable for any other non-expert user.

Having this initial result the Agronet team decided to re-think and re-design the Agromapas module considering, among others, two main requirements, the interface have to be simple and easy-to-use by non-expert users. The main challenge was to make spatial data query and display as simple as possible without losing the analysis capabilities. The design started with a query menu that let users to choose among large sets of indicators from classes for being displayed in a clear map with pre-defined symbology. Now the process was simpler than before, more stable and consistent for many users that could now make it and memorize it.

After the query menu implementation was necessary to choose the set of indicators that will be available on it, taking into account those that are mainly relevant and constantly consulted by users. The most important signs for choosing were traditional reports deployed on Agronet and the amount of queries [3], common information requirements made by MADR professionals to Agronet, and comments received by

teachers on regional courses. Those signs pointed to prioritize maps derived from agricultural indicators over traditional spatial data layers like land use, soils, cadastral parcels and satellite imagery because they were usually small scale data and were disposed already by other sources. It made clear that users wanted to access agricultural related information served by Agronet and no other complementary information already available from other sources.

Last but not least relevant decision on web maps design was related to spatial unit of analysis, for Agromapas was selected the municipality or town unit taking in to account the national impact and the detail of indicators available on Agronet. It was enough to identify spatial variations, distribution and concentration over the Colombian territory and is widely used to analyze some other national indicators [4].

As a result Agromapas was re-designed to support at least ten databases which cover main agricultural topics like crop area, production and yield [5], livestock inventory [6]; reference climate data like mean temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, and sunshine [7]; complemented with some MADR programs coverage indicators like low income rural housing [8], rural microenterprises [9] and Celuagronet. All this ten databases available in Agromapas have also their equivalent reports and tables in Agronet being useful to users that want a complementary view for supporting their analysis and also want to access to raw data.

Agromapas has been accessed 7.449 times in 2013 and 6.659 times in the first six months of 2014, having an average of 1.110 access per month, it represents the 2% of total accesses of the Agronet Portal [10]. Every user of Agromapas can to choose an agricultural theme, the year of interest, the group and indicator that is interested on, and then make a map that shows full detail of the indicator. The main objective of this initiative is to bring a very simple user interface for querying and mapping, nowadays Agronet is working on the optimization of this interface like seen on Fig. 1, to get this is using state-of-the-art technology like Google Maps API [11] and Angular JS [12]. Fig. 1 Example of new and simplified searchbox.

The way that GIS technology supports all described

functionalities is expressed in the architectural design of Agromapas. As shown in Fig. 2 t is a customized arrangement of OGC Compliant open source tools from spatial database system PostgreSQL [13] postGIS 2 [14] , Spatio-Temporal Data Server Geoserver [15], and a map viewer composed by

The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Colombia MADR. The CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).

OpenLayers [16] and GeoExt [17]. The design obeys to requirements of the full interoperable system that Agromapas pretends to be, it is conceived as the future geospatial data node of the agricultural sector in Colombia held by MADR which will link their spatial data with some other national geospatial data nodes and clearinghouses like the Colombian environmental information system -SIAC [18], Colombian hydrocarbons agency [19], land planning geographic information system – SIGOT [20], and some others that compose the Colombian national spatial data infrastructure - ICDE [21]. Fig. 2 Agromapas architectural design.

IV. THE MINISTRY SPATIAL DATA POLICY Institutional structure of the Ministry of agriculture

includes the information and communication technologies - ICT office promoting knowledge and data management [22]. Considering spatial data support as a relevant issue, MADR directors and technicians have also recognized Agronet as the network that would support spatial data management and lead the future spatial data infrastructure node of agriculture. It was the main reason of the ICT office to propose the Ministry as the leader of the ICDE internal group for territory and borders. Leading activities on ICDE started with the definition of a working group on rural affairs that will support future interoperability processes like those derived from the rural property formalization process.

The MADR Social property management Direction monitors the territories where farmers that do not have regular or legal property over lands they use on production, advises those farmers on identifying and solving all legal problems related to its irregular ownership [23]. Advising is composed by activities like cadastral survey, registry of basic information about the ownership as full as possible, compilation of legal documents, and finally definition of the best legal or judicial strategy to get the fastest formalization process. Every activity on advising is supported by spatial data that comes from at least three different organizations that today are not fully interoperable, they have not agreed on technical or institutional details yet. In the last six months the Agronet and ICT teams have been oriented this program on the definition of an specialized SDI concerned on interoperability strategies among those principal actors of the formalization program.

Having decided to lead the territory and border ICDE group, and oriented the formalization ownership interoperability program, MADR faces the important challenge of include spatial data and analysis in every process of the agricultural sector, this challenge is bigger considering that the sector have been planned exclusively based on laws, texts, tables and charts [24], and now territory being considered as the ground where all decisions have to be put over. Some considerations in this change includes the analysis of current situation of land cover, land use and land vocation that incredibly have not been analyzed with spatial data, just using sampling surveys [25].

Some other needs have been exposed to Agronet and ICT office in this process. One of them is the increasingly expressed need of agricultural inputs monitoring for analyzing the different variations of input prices, their costs composition and the reasons for price rising in different regions of the country. The proposed solution was divided into two main tools, first one is based on reports and dynamic queries over Microsoft Power View platform [26], the second tool is composed by a series of map views of spatial variations of prices for main inputs in the last six months. That solution and its two alternatives of analysis evidences the important role of geospatial analysis on daily activities of professionals at MADR.

As described previously this evolution process of Agromapas, from a simple web application to a geospatial platform able to support a Spatial Database Infrastructure, is the result of interactions and experiences with some other organizations and groups, specially the support of associated organizations like Rural Land Planning Office - UPRA and the Bogotá’s office for SDI - IDECA on aspects of SDI strategy formulation, technical design and providers management; also the Social Property Management Direction and the Presidential Office for Victims on the integration of data sources and user requirements definition, and finally the Research program on climate change and food security - CCAFS on integration of research results, national and international Agromapas diffusion and planning for future development.

V. THE RELEVANCE OF AGROMAPAS TODAY Agromapas is built and operates as an Agronet module, it

offers an alternative for visualization an analysis of agricultural indicators. The Agronet network offers more than thirty five data sources and just four of them are included in Agromapas, this little ten percent is estimated without considering spatial characteristics of indicators that should be evaluated before a future spatial analysis. To include this large amount of data sources as map layers is necessary to identify if they have at least a municipal identification or some other spatio-related field that would support the map creation, probably just a little amount of them have this characteristics. It makes evident the large amount of work for the GIS technical team of Agronet for disposing new data sources as web maps.

To have an idea of how the implementation of Agromapas have been impact activities at MADR is helpful to consider which resources have been invested, most of them are related mostly to professional knowledge expressed on hours of design, test and validation of different open source technologies, the general assembly of technologies over test or development environments inside the MADR platform; added to additional hours spent on personalization of software for Web services and graphical interfaces, unit test and optimization of functionalities to get easy-to-use tools.

Regarding Benefits derived from Agromapas implementation, those are not different to processes optimization while comparing, analyzing and visualizing indicators over web maps. Those activities copes almost fifteen (15%) percent of visits of Agronet, compared to the whole set of reports and statistics, that represents an important issue in agricultural information systems basically for the improvement on user interaction and recordation, and also for the option to download data directly from de query interface.

The main improvement and benefit of Agropmapas is the concept design as platform, it is capable of supporting the next important challenges as SDI node like metadata management through catalog web service – CSW [27], harvesting processes and some other common SDI activities. Agromapas’ platform is conceived as an active structure that could be customized according to MADR and agricultural sector requirements.

This platform is just the first step of the important challenge of include spatial data into the agricultural decision making and policy formulation processes. This challenge also includes integration with technologies like data analysis and business intelligence in order to get a full alternative for different actors. Results presented on this paper are just the beginning of this process and the most relevant technological improvement that a government organization in Colombia have gotten in benefit of agriculture and livestock farmers.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT I wish to thank, in the name of the Agronet Team from

MADR, people and organizations that made this paper possible, without their support could not be possible to show you the Agromapas relevance for Colombia.

CCAFS and Dr. Ana Maria Loboguerrero: for showing us this result as an opportunity to start new projects.

MADR planning and Innovation offices: for teaching me how to help farmers with technology and innovation.

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