We want to work on the ontology piece. We have a large, wide ranging set of partners implementing similar (but not the same!) on farm and research level field surveys (observational and hypothesis driven), and we’re hoping to make data comparison across this group as consistent as possible.
@DanT is leading the effort and we’ve been working with @julietnpn and @sudokita to identify appropriate ontologies (or taxonomies maybe?) for questions (like ‘did you till’, ‘did you add an amendment’) and answers (like ‘disked, 6’’’ or ‘compost’ or whatever), with enough context to help the data collection service present an appropriate set of results back to the service to not overwhelm users.
Our case is almost identical (yay!) to USDA’s case, and we’d love to collaborate to further expand utility and cross comparability of data.
So we’ll bring our draft ontology (which we literally need to implement this year, so year… sorry 
and would love to use it as as a starting point of discussion, ideally with feedback that we can integrate on-site.