The itch
Generic farming advice is nearly useless in Sri Lanka. The island has 46 agro-ecological zones, two cultivation seasons, and local varieties that no global crop database has heard of. The real knowledge exists, in decades of Department of Agriculture and research institute publications, but it is scattered across PDFs and websites, mostly in one language at a time, and none of it is queryable.
The plan
Data first, code second. Goyama’s core asset is a structured knowledge corpus of Sri Lankan agriculture: crops, varieties, diseases, remedies, cultivation calendars, and market context, extracted from public sources into a strict schema. Every field carries provenance (source URL, quote, extraction confidence, reviewer) and nothing involving chemical dosages publishes without an agronomist’s sign-off. The corpus is released under open licences; the web and mobile apps are built on top of it, with every recommendation bound to the user’s actual location.
What exists today
The corpus is at v0.0, which is an honest way of saying “schema and pipeline in progress”. Two API endpoints run: a geo lookup that resolves any Sri Lanka coordinate into its district, DS division, and agro-ecological zone, and daily market prices from the Dambulla Dedicated Economic Centre. Several directories in the repo say “coming soon”, and they mean it.
Status
Incubating. Contributors welcome, agronomists especially. More on why the first deliverable is a schema rather than an app in the case study.