Field Analayst 1.1: Design and implementation of a knowledge-based sequential decision support system for increasing agronomic management intensity

A problem with extending the usefulness of spatial data currently be collected by farmers and researchers is that most of the spatial data is collected at different scales and different formats. Few farmers have the complete skills to make use of data from different scales and formats. Most of the data sets also contain incorrect records that need to be removed prior to analysis. Producers are not interested in data per se but want to use the data to enhance their management decision making process too. To accomplish this, producers need tools that take their mass of collected data and transform it into more usable information. To solve this problem an Expert System (ES) can be a powerful tool that incorporates the expertise of agricultural scientists and the farmers archived data to improve field management. A Decision Support System (DSS) needs to be developed as Graphical User Interface (GUI) to allow a user to clean a data set, select a target area, display selected spatial data and analyze multiple years of yield data. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...