The ICAR Animal Data Exchange working group has released a set of JSON and API standards for livestock data exchange. The International Committee for Animal Recording is an international non-governmental organisation (NGO) that helps members and stakeholders share guidelines, best practices and standards in animal recording and production.
The culmination of around two years of work, the ADE-1 specification builds on previous work by the animal data exchange working group, including a previous XML standard. The new JSON and REST API specifications build on work done in this space by DataLinker in New Zealand and JoinData in The Netherlands.
I’m pleased and gratified to be one of the working group members, and to help lead the technical effort that has defined the new specifications, along with technical working group colleagues in Belgium, Finland, Ireland, Germany, New Zealand, The Netherlands, and the United States. I’m grateful for the support of DairyNZ, Beef+Lamb NZ, and the Red Meat Profit Partnership, through DataLinker, that has allowed us to participate, and for the recent involvement of a number of Australian organisations through MLA Integrity Systems Company. Your specifications and improvements are being submitted for inclusion in version 1.1!
There has been strong international support, with several animal recording and technology companies telling us they will use the specification (and indeed, some have already started implementation). Two recent webinars hosted by ICAR were attended by around 120 developers and product managers from a range of organisations.
The ADE-1 specification is released under the Apache 2.0 open source licence, and can be found in GitHub at https://github.com/adewg/ICAR
The working group is turning its attention to new messages and extensions for the next, 1.1 release. If you have suggestions or ideas, submit a suggestion to the issue register in GitHub, or get involved!
