The Open Standards Backbone
AgriFoodData is not a new silo. It is built on a stack of open, widely adopted standards — so the platform can speak to existing GIS tools, sensor stacks, and FMIS without proprietary glue.
| Standard | What it contributes | Used by |
|---|---|---|
| ITU/FAO Reference Architecture | The overall blueprint and contracts at integration boundaries | The whole platform |
| AgroVoc | FAO-maintained, multilingual controlled vocabulary for agriculture | Digital Farm API, Ontology |
| GeoJSON (RFC 7946) | Geometry representation for fields, regions, sites | Digital Farm API |
| OGC SensorThings API | Open OGC standard for sensor management & observations | Sensor Things API |
| OGC API (Features, Coverages, Tiles) | Modern OGC web-service stack for spatial data | Digital Farm API, Spatio-Temporal API |
| STAC — SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog | Catalogue format used by Copernicus, NASA Earthdata, etc. | Spatio-Temporal API |
| JSON-LD, SKOS, OWL, SHACL | Linked-data serialisation, vocabularies, schema and validation of the digital farm twin | Data model, Ontology |
| OpenAPI 3.1, JSON Schema | Machine-readable description of the API and of every record | API reference |
| Web of Things vocabularies | Semantic descriptions for IoT capabilities | Sensor integrations |
| GAIA-X | European data-space framework for sovereign exchange | Data sovereignty |
| IDSA — International Data Spaces | Usage policies and clearing-house contracts for data exchange | Data sovereignty |
| OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect (PKCE, token exchange, JWT) | Authentication of people and apps; consent; access tokens for the APIs | Identity, Authentication & Access |
Why we list standards prominently
Every API page and every reference endpoint carries a standard-conformance
badge (e.g. OGC STA v1.1, STAC v1.0). The badge tells you exactly which
public specification a contract follows, so you can plug in any client library
that already speaks it — pystac, frost-server consumers, QGIS, MapLibre,
ArcGIS, and so on.