# Objectives

We believe information, communication, and dissemination technologies (ICDT) can surely contribute to solve many of the issues described in the Introduction. First, ICDT such as the Internet, is now dynamically changing our lifestyle and social consciousness, and provides us a best tool for information sharing and mutual communication. Second, we should not forget the possible contribution of information science to effective and stable production by several models such as crop growth prediction and decision support. Third, agricultural models, in conjunction with earth monitoring systems and wireless sensor networks in the field, can estimate effects of climatic change in our region. Fourth, field monitoring systems are useful for high throughput phenotyping and can accelerate genetic breeding to make new varieties of crops resilient to climatic changes. Thus, the importance of the studies on Agroinformatics is undoubtedly increasing. The Asian-Pacific countries and regions are keeping the highest growth rate in the world and the requirement on food is abruptly changing from quantity to quality. In addition, the Asia-Pacific countries have their individual agricultural features that are not common in the USA or EU countries. Rice-dependency and farming scale are typical examples. Considering these, APAN Agricultural Working Group (AgWG) will target:

1. Promotion & intermediation of international research and educational projects for agriculture utilizing the APAN infrastructure.
2. Collaborate with Open and Sharing Data WG, Cloud WG, IoT WG, e-Culture WG, DMWG, Security WG to increase innovations in Agriculture.
3. Promotion of international symposia and meetings for Agroinformatics.
4. Inviting researchers from other agricultural research fields such as crop breeding, biodiversity, and rural hybridization, etc.
5. Encouragement of Compliance to international standards of Web Technology.

Those objectives are carried out with other related organization such as Asia-Pacific Federation for Information Technology in Agriculture (APFITA), World Congress in Computer in Agriculture (WCCA), Trans Eurasia Information Network (TEIN), Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nation (FAO), Research Data Alliance (RDA), Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN), and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) WoT WG/IG.

Smart agriculture introduces a variety of booming ICDT technologies, which can promote agricultural research, production, management, etc., encourage into a systematic and wide-area integrated development. These are many difficult works. Therefore, the exchange of construction, research and development experience, development flow, ideas, footprint, etc. of smart agriculture in different countries and research groups are important. It may also be a goal for APAN-AgWG.