AN IMPLEMENTATION OF TRACEABILITY SYSTEM FOR FARM PRODUCTS

The Korea government has implemented the GAP (Good Agricultural Practice) as a pilot national certification system for farm products since 2004. Under the GAP, farmers put in production history and safety information of farm products on the Internet or a farm diary before delivering to the market and perform screening and packing works at an APC (Agricultural Products Certification) designated by the government. In addition, the system makes distribution channels of farm products after delivery traceable and thereby ensures distribution and safety of farm products so that consumers can purchase farm products without anxiety. As a certification system, GAP is granted by the government only when farm production traceability is registered. This paper presents a design of temporal databases, referring to essential elements in farming for a farm production traceability system. In particular, in a bid to minimize possible errors made at the time of database designing, attributes of subtle elements, which could be hard for general programmers to find, are extracted and presented when farmers put in data of production history. This paper briefly explains concepts of GAP and farm production traceability system. In addition, in order to investigate similar database systems, www.atrace.net. a farm production traceability system developed by the Rural Development Administration of Korea was analyzed with actual cases on the basis of which modeling and design of a database system of the farm production traceability system were performed