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Crop Production |
Crop Pattern |
Crop Yield |
Irrigation |
Soil Management | Precision Farming |
Relevant Products |
Relevant Links
Integrated National Agricultural Resources Information System (INARIS)
S. D. Sharma, Randhir Singh and Anil Rai
Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute, New Delhi
rsingh@iasri.delhi.nic.in
Introduction
National agricultural production, on a sustainable basis, depends on the judicious use of natural resources like soil, water, animal resources, crop/plant genetic resources, etc. with an acceptable technology management under prevailing socio-economic infrastructure. In order to achieve an economically sound society, environmentally benign development and judicious utilization of natural resources, it is necessary that a comprehensive information system be developed to provide systematic and periodic information to the planners, decision-makers and developmental agencies. The animal and plant genetic resources of India are of great global importance. These resources need proper evaluation that can be done through interactive interpretation in a relational database system. Also, digitizing socio-economic database along with biophysical factors is important to objectively monitor and evaluate the current and future agricultural growth and development.
Many agencies have developed various information systems, which include databases on different resources. Space Application Center (SAC) has developed Natural Resources Information System (NRIS). The database covers information on various soil types and water bodies of the entire country. It includes both the spatial and non-spatial databases. Department of Science and Technology (DST) has developed a Natural Resources Data Management System (NRDMS) with the aim of developing and demonstrating the use of spatial decision support for integrated planning and management of resources for micro level planning. Under NRDMS they have also developed a user-friendly Geographic Information System (GIS) package viz. GeoReferenced Area Management (GRAM) for entry, storage, manipulation, analysis and display of spatial data on a low cost computer configuration.
Thus, the development of a data warehouse on soil, water, climate, animal, fisheries, crops and cropping system along with socio-economic and geographical features on a single platform, and to evolve methodologies to interpret the inter-linked data through the Central Data Warehouse (CDW) for planning and development purposes. Therefore a nation wide project named Integrated National Agricultural Resources Information System (INARIS) has been initiated at Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute (IASRI), Indian Council Of Agriculture Research (ICAR) funded through National Agriculture Technology Mission (NATP). In this project various existing databases developed or being developed at various centers will be integrated and database on critical data gaps of various fields will be designed for important parameters in respective field and an operational and flexible warehouse for agricultural resources so that it can be expanded further, in future as per requirements.
Data Warehouse- A strategic decision making tool
The data warehouse is an architectural construct that addresses the growing need of information for enterprise-wide data access. It functions as a core for decision support processing at the strategic/ managerial level, separate from day to day operational data. It is not software specific and can be used in any computing environment. Ralph Kimball defines data warehouse as “a copy of information data specifically structured for query and analysis”.
The data in a data warehouse can be seen as a set of materialized views derived from source data, where the source data can be relational in the operational database or other non-traditional data such as data files, legacy systems and document data. Since the raw data normally changes over time, materialized views in a data warehouse have to be updated to ensure consistency with the source data. Data warehousing is more than a database and involves the entire information delivery process i.e., from access and transformation of data from different operational sources, through the process that makes it available for decision making, to the exploitation of the retrieved data via a range of decision support tools.
The growing need for the data warehousing technology in recent years has stemmed because of the technology’s importance in supporting decision support processing and analysis. A specific property of data warehouse that makes efficient application processing is that most of the applications are decision support oriented applications that need to summarize huge amounts of data. The growing trend in data warehouse architecture is to store the data both in the data warehouse and in several data marts, where each data mart contains the data pertaining to a particular domain of the organization’s operations.
Databases to be included in the Datawarehouse
In all there are thirteen different institutions/centers of ICAR associated with this project which will be covering databases on crops, cropping systems, plantation crops, horticultural crops, agro-forestry, agricultural farm mechanization, animal genetic resource, plant genetic resource, fish genetic resource, soil, water, spices, climatic parameters together with socio-economic databases relevant to agriculture research and education. The entire information system will include several databases, which can be broadly divided into following major categories.
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