Customer Profile: The USDA CAPS program "is a combined effort by Federal and State agricultural organizations to conduct surveillance, detection, and monitoring of agricultural crop pests and biological control agents." The significance of the program increased substantially with the new homeland security initiative, especially the part of the program that deals with hostile and dangerous pests and agents.

Business Situation: It took more than half a year for the plant and pest data to reach the central USDA database, delay which was not acceptable in the current security alert atmosphere. Moreover, the accuracy of the location data was not good enough. The USDA survey process consisted of field technicians going to the locations of interest and filling paper surveys about what they saw. Then, after the season was over they spent several weeks going through the paper surveys and putting them in electronic form (in a very complicated specific format required by the central database) and submitting them. Often the data was in the wrong format because of human error and was rejected. There were many different types of surveys and this data was spread across multiple databases.

Solution: The knowledge management system consists of a Pocket PC application on Windows CE for data collection and a Desktop Data Administration application to manage the collected data. To improve data accuracy, survey forms contained in the Pocket PC application are paired with location information from a Global Positioning System (GPS) unit. Collected information is submitted in an Extensible Markup Language (XML) format to the Data Administration application. The Data Administration application parses the submitted data and stores it in a database designed by the team. From there the data can be selected for submission to the central USDA database. Other administrative functions include handling requests for surveys, assigning surveys to inspectors and handling diagnostic lab data.

Business Benefits:

Improved speed of data management. Application can save several months. Urgent information can be handled in a timely manner.
Improved accuracy of the survey data through GPS units and single data entry.
More accurate inspections. Administration can specify pests their inspectors need to look at.
Usable survey forms. Forms on the Pocket PC contain extensive information about the pests.

Technologies:

Visual C#
Windows CE
Embedded Tools
Access Database (to be ported to SQL if possible)
GPS Software
iPaq