We provide the implementation of an innovative cloud based Farm Management System.It provides a framework that allows the interconnection among services developed by different service providers.It is open and flexible so it can be tailored to the needs of different farmers.We have utilized domain independent software modules called generic enablers, developed within the FI-WARE project. Recent technological advances have paved the way for developing and offering advanced services for the stakeholders in the agricultural sector. A paradigm shift is underway from proprietary and monolithic tools to Internet-based, cloud hosted, open systems that will enable more effective collaboration between stakeholders. This new paradigm includes the technological support of application developers to create specialized services that will seamlessly interoperate, thus creating a sophisticated and customisable working environment for the end users. We present the implementation of an open architecture that instantiates such an approach, based on a set of domain independent software tools called \"generic enablers\" that have been developed in the context of the FI-WARE project. The implementation is used to validate a number of innovative concepts for the agricultural sector such as the notion of a services' market place and the system's adaptation to network failures. During the design and implementation phase, the system has been evaluated by end users, offering us valuable feedback. The results of the evaluation process validate the acceptance of such a system and the need of farmers to have access to sophisticated services at affordable prices. A summary of this evaluation process is also presented in this paper.

Recent technological advances have paved the way for developing and offering advanced services for the stakeholders in the agricultural sector. A paradigm shift is underway from proprietary and monolithic tools to Internet-based, cloud hosted, open systems that will enable more effective collaboration between stakeholders. This new paradigm includes the technological support of application developers to create specialized services that will seamlessly interoperate, thus creating a sophisticated and customisable working environment for the end users. We present the implementation of an open architecture that instantiates such an approach, based on a set of domain independent software tools called “generic enablers” that have been developed in the context of the FI-WARE project. The implementation is used to validate a number of innovative concepts for the agricultural sector such as the notion of a services’ market place and the system’s adaptation to network failures. During the design and implementation phase, the system has been evaluated by end users, offering us valuable feedback. The results of the evaluation process validate the acceptance of such a system and the need of farmers to have access to sophisticated services at affordable prices. A summary of this evaluation process is also presented in this paper.

Smart/precision farming systems are expected to play an important role in improving farming activities. During the past years, sophisticated farm management systems have emerged to replace outdated complex and monolithic farm systems and software tools. The latest trend is to enable these management systems to operate over the Internet. However, the Internet, in its current operation form, faces a number of shortcomings especially in handling vast numbers of networked devices (i.e., Internet of Things) or allowing a simplified integration of systems and services developed by different players. Currently, a number of research initiatives aim at addressing these shortcomings. Such an example is the “Future Internet” program launched by the European Commission. In the context of our work, we have specified a farm management system that takes advantage of the new characteristics that “Future Internet” offers. These come in terms of generic software modules that can be used to build farming related specialized modules. We present the functional architecture of this farm management system and provide an operational example. We also analyze the technological enablers that will make this architecture a reality.

We propose a new strategy for a constructive training of feedforward neural networks to classify linearly nonseparable patterns. The algorithm results in a configuration of the first layer of the network, which is able to give a faithful internal representation of the input patterns. The weights of the network are obtained by the CadaTron algorithm introduced, which is able to separate clusters of data in a robust way. Iteratively, further neurons are added to the neural net in order to decrease the training error. Unnecessary neurons are removed, so this algorithm leads to a network with low complexity and excellent generalization properties. The results of this work are based on the classification of handwritten characters.