Methodologies for solving the integration problem of agricultural enterprise applications: Agents, web, services and ontologies

The great expansion of Information Technology (IT) creates many new vital challenges for the future of the enterprises in the agri-food sector. In fact, many members in the agri-food sector have realised the challenges and that adoption of IT is crucial for their survival. For this reason, different types of Agricultural Information Systems (AISs) have been developed. Unfortunately, one issue which seems to attract less attention is the integration of all these AISs. We believe that integration of individual AISs is important because in today's globalised environment interoperability is essential in creating ‘complete’ and effective solutions based on AISs. In this paper we argue that the issue of integration should be of greater focus in the development of AISs in the future. Furthermore, we discuss existing methodologies to approach the issue of integration such as agents, ontologies and web services.