The Development of a Spatial-temporal Analysis System Prototype for Rice Inventory Data in Taiwan

Rice is one of the major agricultural crops in Taiwan. The Council of Agriculture (COA) has spent millions of dollars on the creation and research of rice inventory data in the last twenty years. Although a huge volume of data archive is created, unfortunately most of the analysis has been only concentrating on overall statistical numbers. We argued in this paper that the rice inventory data actually provides both spatial and temporal perspectives toward the rice crop status, and an appropriate system design based on the spatial-temporal nature of rice inventory data can help COA to have a better control of rice production, as well as the adjustment of related agricultural policy. The proposed system prototype not only successfully fulfill spatial (single arable land or region) and temporal (single or multiple seasons) querying requirement, it also enables COA to analyze cropping patterns for the selected area. The latter is valuable to the understanding of real world phenomena and has potential to serve as reference information for such applications as nature hazard assessment and the supervised classification of remote sensing images. The major contribution of this research is spatial-temporal analysis, which were either time consuming or even impossible to complete by human operators in the past, can now be completed readily with computers. Though the efficiency of the system prototype still needs further improvement, nonetheless, the preliminary result clearly indicates the value and potential by adding spatial-temporal consideration to management and analysis of rice inventory database.