Technical Minutes 2020 01 17

ICAR Animal Data Exchange Working Group – Technical meeting 17 January 2020

Apologies: Kor Odinga, David Bleloch, Connie Graumans In attendance: Andrew, Andreas, Anton, Arjan, Beate, Beate, Bert, Erwin, Henning, John, Sven.

Agreed a software licence is appropriate
Recommend the Apache 2.0 Licence
Does allow derivative works and requires attribution. Derivatives allows national or species-specific schemes to create schemas that add additional fields.
Someone creating an incompatible derivative and claiming ICAR compatibility could still be a problem; probably best achieved by dealing with the claim (accreditation or similar).
Contributors who were in attendance at this meeting agreed to their contributions being licenced under this licence, subject approval of the licence selection by the WG and ICAR.

The feedback had already been communicated: That we agreed with the intent, but it should be called something other than UUID, which might otherwise cause confusion. It really means a key that is unique within ICAR, and as such it could even be human readable.

The outreach subcommittee proposed that a webinar be held in April, in addition to an interactive event at Leewarden in June.
We were enthusiastic about the idea. A suggested agenda was:

How to find and use the GitHub repository
Basic structure of messages and URLs (Andrew and Erwin could do some of this)
Example application (Anton has created a very simple example; Arjan could also talk about the JoinData implementation)
Allow plenty of time for questions.

We are fine with most of the fields
Not comfortable with “loadcell” being the default. Perhaps have “Not Specified” and/or remove the default entirely – decision: to remove the default and allow the field to be empty if unknown/not specified.
Discussion on pen weight – should total and number of animals be included? We decided this could be added by extensions if people wanted this, because the current specification targets the individual animal, for which the average is ok.
Trait Label could be used on a number of different events. For this reason we should define it as a type icarTraitLabelType.
Operator – no comments for or against
TimeOffFeed – substantial discussion whether this was another event (feeding or removal from feed?) Decided that if this could be input manually on the UI of weigh scales, it is valid to include in the event. It is needed to make sense of weights in extensive grazing systems.
managementGroup – substantial discussion about the intent of this. It was intended to work with animal attributes (such as gender, age, age of dam, etc) to form a contemporary group for analysis of the weight. Should this be another event (change of contemporary group)? Or a combination of events? Perhaps this should be called “contemporaryGroup” to avoid confusion with planned activities or management mobs. Applies to other observations, not just weights.

Please review the Heat (GitHub issue 58) and Device (GitHub issue 59) on GitHub and make comments to save time at the meeting.
Agenda for next meeting (more items may be added)

Heat and Device messages
Test Messages (GitHub issue 13)
Swagger Examples and whether these should be split up (GitHub issue 18 and related [GitHub issue 26]( https://github.com/adewg/ICAR/issues/26