V.DIG.1907 - Review and Build of NLIS Data Visualisation of Animal Movements

Summary

A significant proportion of the trust and strong reputation of Australia’s $23 billion red meat industry can be attributed largely to its integrity systems. Elements of the red meat integrity system include the National Livestock Identification System (NLIS) ensuring traceability, Livestock Production Assurance (LPA), the red meat industry’s on-farm assurance program for food safety, animal welfare and biosecurity, and the national vendor declaration (NVD) providing the documentation that verifies on-farm practices and animal treatments.

The Integrity Systems Company (ISC) has collected within the NLIS system a large amount of animal movement data over the 20 years of its existence. This NLIS is a permanent lifetime traceability system that includes:
- Records of Device and PIC statuses
- Device and corresponding livestock movements tracked for the purposes of: (i)
biosecurity; (ii) food safety;
- (iii) product integrity; (iv) market access; and (v) other industry related purposes.
- Data on (a) carcase feedback information; (b) group or mob based movement data; (c) scanned images of NVD or movement documentation; and (d) responses to questions on NVD forms.
To date, NLIS data has been represented to stakeholders though a number of retrospective textual/numeric reports generated from the system. There is now a desire to visualise the value of this data to stakeholders in a more compelling, graphically designed and visually rich way highlighting animal movements, traceability and biosecurity related risk areas, anomalies and other key data points. On approval from industry and the ISC Board, this visualisation will be used by ISC and the jurisdictions to discover day-to-day insights, on the screens in the ISC/MLA offices, via a government accessible dashboard, within ISC presentations and used as an input into direct marketing campaigns to NLIS and LPA participants to drive improvements in system compliance.

This project seeks to review the available NLIS data, graphically design a compelling visual representation of NLIS data, identify and fill any data gaps required to realise the visualisation and to build the data visualisation for use across digital medium.

Objectives

1. A thorough review of the NLIS system data identifying opportunities for presentation along
with any data gaps or enrichment opportunities to enhance presentation of the data.
2. The development of a mechanism for extracting/accessing the required data from the NLIS
database), without degrading the performance of the NLIS product (the NLIS platform is
based on the Microsoft SQL Server, C#.net stack).
3. The development of a visualisation of NLIS data to be used for real time day to day
reporting, within the ISC website, on the screens in the ISC/MLA offices and in ISC
presentations. The visualisation may also be used by state government.

Benefits to industry

The visualisation will provide value to industry and levy payers by highlighting the integrity data that ISC collects on behalf of industry and showcasing a number of the key insights and data points contained in the NLIS database.

Future research