8th GNSS Workshop - Dublin 2008

This repot covers the 8th GNSS workshop, jointly organised by the JRC and the Irish Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (DAFF) This series of JRC GNSS workshops aim to review and update the various technical aspects regarding the control methods. Under the workshop formula, the event also provides a forum to discuss issues freely and to provide a channel for all stakeholders, Member States, contractors and even auditors to express feedbackJRC.G.3-Agricultur

An exploration of synchronization solutions for parallel short-range optical interconnect in mesochronous systems

As a result of the increasing complexity of electronic chips, the bandwidths required for inter- and intra-chip communication are rapidly increasing. As optoelectronics provides high=bandwidth and high-density interconnection it is considered as a candidate for short-range interconnection. For such interconnections, situated at a low level in the systems hierarchy, the interconnect latency is extremely critical for the systems performance. This paper describes some methods for mesochronous synchronization, needed for such interconnections. It will be shown that it can be beneficial to use an additional optical link to transfer a synchronization signal. Such a reference signal can be used efficiently for phase detection, provided that the data skew is sufficiently small, and result in a decrease of the cost-per-link

Analysis of the sampling representativeness for the Land Parcel Identification System Quality Assurance

After its 2016 performance audit on the Land Parcel Identification System (LPIS), the European Court of Auditors recommended that the Commission should carry out a cost-benefit analysis in order to determine whether the representativeness of QA samples could be improved so that a better coverage of the population of parcels in LPIS be achieved. This report holds the results of that analysis. An appropriate indicator for representativeness was developed and benchmarked. That indicator, “percentage of the population in the 95% central probability interval (PCPI)” was then applied to the actual samples of the past to measure their performance. Additionally, the simulation of several sampling scenarios allowed to assess whether sub-optimal conditions could be remediated by the appropriate mitigation measures. The results reconfirmed that the initial approach of spatial stratification does not interfere with the representativeness in se, but it also found that the current implementation could leave a few territories with some residual effect from the implied spatial clustering. This potential weakness was addressed by improving the resolution of the stratification control layer, ensuring a minimum set of clusters as well as introducing stratified random sampling. Simulations demonstrated these combined remedies were effective for nearly all Member States and regions. Cyprus and Luxemburg missed the target, but only just. The revised methodology led to a 15 percent increase of the number of control zones over Europe, but did not require any procedural modification or other additional inspection workload for the Member States. This revised sampling methodology thus considers the Court’s cost-benefit concerns and has been fully implemented for the 2017 LPIS QA campaign.JRC.D.5-Food Securit

Towards a tighter integration of generated and custom-made hardware

Most of today's high-level synthesis tools offer a fixed set of interfaces to communicate with the outer world. A direct integration of custom IF in the datapath would often be more beneficial than an integration using such communication interfaces. If a certain interface protocol is not offered by the tool, either translation blocks (wrappers) are needed or the code should be written at a lower level. The former solution may hurt the performance, while the latter one is often impossible using an untimed high-level description. In this paper interface protocols or sets of JP core accesses are first described at a low level as sets of operations with scheduling information (macros). During the synthesis process, corresponding function calls are mapped to these macros. This facilitates the integration of custom-made hardware and hardware generated by high-level synthesis tools

CLooGVHDL and JCCI

CLooGVHDL and JCCI offer an extendible C-to-VHDL framework to develop high-level synthesis techniques for data-intensive applications on heterogeneous memory systems. 1

LPIS Workshop: 'LPIS applications and quality', Sofia (Bulgaria), 17-18 September, 2008

This report contains overview of annual workshop on Land Parcel Identification System (LPIS) which took place in Sofia (Bulgaria), 17-18th of September, 2008. The workshop is targeted the technological responsible persons from the member state administrations. This year workshop ¿LPIS applications and quality¿ aimed to identify and discuss the key technological issues and examples of solutions that are relevant for operating a LPIS in the environment of administration and control system for direct payments to the European farmers in the framework of the CAP. The topics covered during the workshop included: geomatics aspects of the LPIS; data quality issues with a focus on quality management and quality policy; interaction of LPIS applications with control process and monitoring of the rural development measures; country status reports, in particular focusing on ¿lessons learnt¿ during completion of LPIS in Bulgaria and Romania as well as pilot project of LPIS creation in Croatia.JRC.G.3-Agricultur

LPIS/IACS topics: Land tenure and “at the disposal of”

This material is an introduction and the discussion document about the legal and spatial context of defining agricultural parcels of the Land parcel information system. So far, some EU Member States’ Administrations use legal documents in evidencing the land that is at the farmers’ disposal to be entitled for payment support. None of the acts from EU regulation provides specific provisions how authorities should verify that the farmer holds access and use rights for agricultural parcels he declares. Once legal documents became necessary to evidence the use of land, many issues arise and prevent a farmer to declare actual utilization of agricultural land. MS Authorities put more obligations to the farmer than necessary. Those legal and spatial records are very often not up-to-date and full of inaccuracies, hence should be considered with attention. We provide insights of those discrepancies and provide recommendations to the Member States’ Administrations.JRC.D.5-Food Securit

Users’ Assessment of Orthoimage Photometric Quality for Visual Interpretation of Agricultural Fields

Land cover identification and area quantification are key aspects of implementing the European Common Agriculture Policy. Rightfulness of support provided to farmers is monitored using the Land Parcel Identification System (LPIS), with land cover identification performed by photointerpretation. While the geometric orthoimage quality required for correct photointerpretation is well understood, little is known about the photometric quality needed for LPIS applications. This paper analyzes the orthoimage quality characteristics chosen by authors as being most suitable for visual identification of agricultural fields. We designed a survey to assess users’ preferred brightness and contrast ranges for orthoimages used for LPIS purposes. Survey questions also tested the influence of a background color on the preferred orthoimage brightness and contrast, the preferred orthoimage format and color composite, assessments of orthoimages with shadowed areas, appreciation of image enhancements and, finally, consistency of individuals’ preferred brightness and contrast settings across multiple sample images. We find that image appreciation is stable at the individual level, but preferences do vary across respondents. We therefore recommend that LPIS operators be enabled to personalize photometric settings, such as brightness and contrast values, and to choose the displayed band combination from at least four spectral bands.JRC.H.4-Monitoring Agricultural Resource

Discussion document on the introduction of monitoring to substitute OTSC - Supporting non-paper DS/CDP/2017/03 revising R2017/809

This discussion document builds upon the non-paper DS/CDP/2017/03 to introduce the possibility for substituting the OTSC by a system of monitoring for checking the fulfilment of land use/ land cover related CAP requirements. It describes the main concepts and components that need to be considered and developed for substituting the sampled on the spot checks of aid applications with a monitoring system on all of the applications. The goal is simplification and reduction of the burden of controls and especially for what concerns number of field visits. Such substitution requires a shift in thinking, procedures as well as technology and these are topics elaborated in some detail. An annex provides illustrations, examples, field cases and elaborations of the key topics. This document constitutes the Commission’s interpretation of common standards.JRC.D.5-Food Securit

Validation of Driving Simulation to Assess On-Road Performance in Huntington Disease

Driving simulators are increasingly used to assess the driving capabilities of persons with neurodegenerative conditions. However, few driving simulator evaluations have been validated against standardized on-road tests. The aim of this study was to investigate the concurrent validity of a comprehensive driving simulator evaluation in 29 persons with Huntington disease (HD). The Test Ride for Investigating Practical fitness to drive (TRIP) checklist was administered after a 15 km simulator drive and 20 km on-road drive. The total driving simulator TRIP score and each of its item scores were compared with the on-road TRIP scores using Spearman rho correlation statistics. We found significant correlations for 9 of the 12 items. Correlations ranged between 0.12 for the item gap distance at speed below 50 km/h and 0.72 for the total TRIP score, indicating variable strength of the associations. Items assessing operational skills correlated better with on-road driving performance than tactical or higher-order visual items. The results indicate that a fixed-base, single screen driving simulator is a valid tool to assess on-road driving capabilities in persons with HD