Designing and Implementing a Grid Application for Cumulative Agrichemical Residue Tracking using Third-Party Data Sources and Software Components

It is increasingly important to design software for reuse so future changes can be implemented as easily and cheaply as possible. It is also beneficial to use existing resources where they are available. This paper describes an agricultural application for cumulative agrichemical residue tracking designed and implemented to use grid technologies to access external third-party databases and software components. The application incorporates pre-existing software, and accesses meteorological, spatial, agrichemical and operational data, most of which are external databases owned and managed by third parties, and where the application must also be able to handle alternative data sources in each domain area.