[emcrazyone]

I'm the lead software architect at a major agricultural and construction equipment manufacturer. I deal with this stuff every day.

I'm not aware of any efforts to make collected data available but what I can say about the company I work for is that we largely view the data the farmer or operator's personal property. We don't transmit it back to any data center presently but we do have ways to copy the captured data off to a USB stick for post processing which a number of 3rd party precision farming applications are on the market to read it.

What I can say about the data is that it's voluminous. Our software collect all kinds of data besides just precision farming data. For example, CAN bus faults, GPS history (vehicle guidance), weather conditions (temperature, humidity), etc... And the way the data is collected follows no industry set standard - it's pretty much proprietary formats.

Also, much of our data collection is stored locally in a binary format to save space and improve performance. We have tools that move the data back to a flat file/text format for post processing.

I'm not involved with the 3rd parties that use the data but my guess is that someone has shared with them the formats and such.

[microDude]

Yes, this is a common problem to all industries. Formats can be figured out or obtained from the OEM, then a gateway is created to transform into a digestible format (my guess some XML schema). In the article, the author states his company [1], where in the tech section he describes this very scenario.

[1]https://www.farmobile.com

[MisterBastahrd]

I've dealt with something similar, working for a small publisher in niche markets. We've got dozens of customers, some on third party platforms, and others with their own proprietary data formats. I built a platform to convert their data to our own format. Usually that part is easy. Mapping their categorization to our own is the time-consuming part.