Data standards
The FOAG’s Competence Center for Digital Transformation manages and supports the eCH specialist group for agricultural data. It helps to ensure that the various players in the agricultural and food sector can exchange digital data on a standardized basis.
Why keep reinventing the world?
It is obvious to everyone that standards and norms are useful in everyday life: be it sockets, connecting cables, parking spaces or the gauge of railroad tracks. Such standards make life easier. They facilitate cooperation, simplify technical solutions, reduce costs, enable interoperability and create transparency.
What is a data standard?
This also applies to the transfer of data. Data standards define the exchange format and the permissible values for electronic data exchange. If all users of the standard adhere to these uniform rules, it is ensured that the data is not only recorded without errors, but is also correctly understood by the recipients. Together with interface standards, which are primarily concerned with the technical transmission and addressing of data exchange between different systems, data standards belong to the so-called interoperability standards. Interoperability, in turn, refers to the ability of different systems to work together as smoothly as possible in order to exchange data efficiently. To ensure this, coordinated maintenance, further development and implementation of new versions of interface and data standards is of great importance.
The first results of the eCH expert group on agricultural data
At the end of 2021, the Agricultural Data Expert Group was founded on the initiative of the Federal Office for Agriculture (FOAG). It is made up of various stakeholders from the agricultural and food sector. After around two years of work, the first four data standards were published on April 15, 2024.
- eCH-0261 Operational and company data
- eCH-0262 Farm data and use of operating resources
- eCH-0263 Operating resources
- eCH-0265 Areas and crops
These four data standards are harmonized with eCH-0108 Company Master Data and Company Register Version 6.0 of 4 April 2024. Further data standards are being developed and are very likely to follow.
The eCH association was founded on December 13, 2002 in Bern as a non-profit organization on the initiative of the Federal IT Strategy Unit (FSU). It develops standards in the field of eGovernment – for efficient digital collaboration between authorities, companies and private individuals. In addition to the Confederation, all cantons and various municipalities, over 100 companies, universities of applied sciences, associations and individuals are members of eCH.
The president is Peppino Giarritta, delegate of the Confederation and the cantons for the Swiss Digital Administration (DVS), and the managing director is Lorenz Frey-Eigenmann. The office supports 23 specialist groups in their work. These ensure that the standards are developed and maintained to a high quality and free from vested interests. The twelve-member expert committee controls the standardization process and decides on the approval of the data standards submitted by the expert groups.