Conversion of a Profile Description Sheet to an Open Data Kit (ODK)

The interest of using informatics tools for collecting information on agro-biodiversity is increasing, since they greatly facilitate the collection and sharing of data. Current practice which is primarily paper-based limits the scale and complexity of the services that can be provided and thus the impact of the intervention. Soil survey needs to be up to date, using a paper based survey can create problems thus the need to use ODK. Profile description sheet is a paper based survey form and was converted with the help of the open data kit tools which are the XLSFORM(build), the Collect and the Aggregate. It was converted to an ODK format by creating the form using the XLSFORM which was then uploaded to an ODK aggregate (precisely ONA) and downloaded on the ODK Collect. The study therefore indicated that ODK format can be used for soil profile data collection. It's therefore recommended that ODK can be used for soil profile description for ease of data collection, storage and transmission.