Business Inteligence in Agriculture

General Description

AgriDescriptor is an analytical-descriptive application to visualize, in summarized and multidimensional form, the information contained in relational databases through diverse univariates and multivaried statistical techniques. Information can be displayed into tables and graphics which ca be exported to MS Excel. Is an application for decision-support in agribusiness.

Technical Aspects

1. Data base:

The data base to be included in the system must be compound of at least three tables related by a unique key. Normally the first table, denominated Table of Identification, stores the information of identification of the experimental units for analysis (farm, paddock, year, animal, etc). where, in addition to the unique number of identification, relevant information of each unit is contained. The second table, denominates Tables of Dimensions, is where each unit of analysis has a field that classifies it within a group for the dimensional analyses. This table will be empty initially and the fields or dimensions will be created by the user using the same system. The third and other tables have fields or variables of interest for all or part of the analysis units. There is not limits in the amount of tables to be included.

2. Dimensions of analysis:

Using the Grouping Module of the system and the same information contained in the database, the user can create a new field in the table of Dimensions to classified it into a group or dimension. The system uses different methods for grouping units (see table bellow).

Method	Characteristics
	Arbitrary		Non Arbitrary
	Univariate	Multivariate	Univariate	Multivariate
User-defined groups
Division by percentages
Division by ranges
Cluster Analysis

The Arbitrarily refers that is the user, according to his criteria, the one that imposes the decision rules to group the analysis units, whereas the Non Arbitrarily refers to the methods in which statistical characteristics of the units are used to group them. Univariate techniques use only one variable to group while the Multivariate ones use a combination of several variables.

3. Analyses:

With AgriDescriptor the user can make two types of analyses: Qualitative and Quantitative. The former apply categorical, ordinal or binomial (False/True) variables, producing Frequencies Tables and Graphs. The latter applies to continuous or integer variables producing Univariate Analyses, Graphs and Cross-tabulations (Decision cubes).

4. SQL Querying:

The system has SQL editor with which the user can extract information of the data bases using this language.

5 Outputs

All tables and graphs can be exported to MS Excel.

Users and Version

The AgriDescriptor, in its version 1.0, is a very powerful tool for those organizations, companies, farmers, consultants, researchers and those who have diverse databases and wish to quickly collate data in an application that allows them to easily extract relevant information to support the decision making in their organization or professional activities. All this with no need being an expert in handling of data bases or statistic.

Technological platform and database

Is an application developed in Delphi over a Paradox databases. However is designed to establish connections to other databases by ODBC.

Additional Modules

There are several modules that are being developed:

a. GIS (Geographical Information System) to deal with geo-references, maps and layers.
b. Field Management for creating and editing tables and fields.
c. Statistical Module for hypotheses tests.

Technical requirements

IBM Compatibles, Pentium o Celeron, 16MB Ram, Resolution 1024X768; Windows 95/NT or higher.

Language

Interchanging double language
Languages available: Spanish, English (in process)

Prices:

$2,000 plus implemetation costs:

Support contrats from $100.00/year.