Institut de recherche pour l'Ingénierie de
l'Agriculture et de l'Environnement - Cemagref
CEMAGREF is a public agricultural and environmental research institute whose work focuses
on sustainable development in non-urban areas. It contributes to the conservation and
acceptable management of land and water systems, the growth of economic activity on a
sustainable basis, and the prevention of associated risks. Besides advancing fundamental
knowledge, Cemagref makes available its diagnostics and control methods, designs
negotiation and management tools, develops innovative technologies and supports public and
private enterprise with its skills and experience.
Cemagref has developed a specific scientific expertise in the domains of geoinformation and
design of agricultural and environmental information systems, including interoperability
between information systems and wireless communication. Works are carried out under the
umbrella of the "joint research unit" TETIS, which associates Cemagref, CIRAD and
ENGREF, French High School for agricultural and environmental engineering.
In relation of information and communication technologies (ICT), the major research topics
are focused on:
(i) the interoperability of the heterogeneous information systems used by farmers and their
institutional and economical partners;
(ii) the data exchange and communication between environmental information systems and
the associated conceptual design methodologies.
As referenced projects examples for the last years, we can quote:
With the actors of the agricultural sphere (French Ministries of Agriculture, of Environment,
French Energy and Environment Agency, Permanent Assembly of French chambers of
agriculture agro equipments users, cooperatives federations) and agricultural TIC
engineering societies (Satplan/ISAGRI, SWORD):
-
SIGEMO : a shared geographical information system for organic matter spreading
management (spreading map building and lawful validation) of which the
development and the implementation are presently in progress for the seven first pilots
sites tests by the end of 2006 year.
- GIEA: a farm information management project that gathers the majority of the
farmer’s partners with the aim to reach a semantic and conceptual homogenisation for
data exchanges between all partners to support Information System interoperability
concerning farmers’ practices.
- Cematrace: a new embedded device linked with PDA and GPS for in field agroequipments
tasks analyzes and real work (as spreading) survey.
With some actors of the telecommunications sector (France: EADS Astrium, Eutelsat,
Aneto, CNES - Netherlands: Aramiska, Picopoint - Norway: Nera ) and end-users
(framers, contractors, consultancy society) and French ICT research laboratories:
- TWISTER (Terrestrial Wireless Infrastructure integrated with Satellite
Telecommunications for E-Rural): an IP6 project with the Objective to develop hybrid
satellite-wireless broadband solutions (with satellites and Wifi communication
technologies) allowing to provide innovative broadband services and applications
meeting the needs of rural user communities (examples: CAP e-declaration, irrigation
supervision…).
- FORUM: a French Research Agency (ANR) project that deals with the problem of
information integration in a large and highly dynamic information space. It aims at
developing a scalable and flexible information-sharing infrastructure that enables
effective use of a potentially large and dynamic collection of information sources.
Another research team has developed a collar for electronic guarding of herds (patent n°
9910949) and has got a large expertise on field monitoring using "ground-based systems".
They are working on "ad hoc" autonomous measurement systems (soil, landscape, water, …)
and developing correspondent electronic devices.
Cemagref will bring its expertise to OTAG consortium in the field of i) state or the art in technologies and data acquisition, ii) quality of data for wireless networks iii) architecture of
information systems and iv) design and development of a specific electronic collar.
Website: http://www.cemagref.fr
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