A data quality assessment tool for agricultural structured data as support for smart farming

In the field of precision farming or smart farming, more and more sensors are used and produce a massive amount of data. Examples are machinery, weather stations, or georeferenced data, which can be used, among other things, by Artificial Intelligence decision support systems to improve or facilitate farmers’ daily work tasks. Even if there are no issues in transferring (Internet of Things) sensor data from machines to farm management information systems, data still contain errors such as missing, implausible, or incorrect data values. In this paper, we present an automated data quality assessment (DQA) tool based on the ISO25012 standard. We describe the process of how we developed this tool with support from practitioners who produce agricultural data in the context of the EU Horizon 2020 project DEMETER. Additionally, we highlight some of the requirements we collected for such a tool and briefly discuss how we addressed them. For example, we learned that in the context of developing smart farming services, the data quality dimensions Accuracy, Completeness, Consistency, and Credibility are the most important ones for practitioners such as farmers, digital service providers, or machine suppliers. Therefore, we included them in the DQA tool and implemented it in Python. It is released under the open-source Apache 2 license. Individual parameters can be provided as input for calculations (e.g., thresholds or time lengths) to meet different users’ needs. The output of the DQA is provided in machine-readable JSON format and can be used for further analysis, e.g., to improve the quality of the data collection or the followup data analysis. This can help practitioners develop more valuable smart farming services.