An integrated, ontology-based agricultural information system

Abstract

This paper proposes an integrated, ontology-based agricultural information system (AIS) to provide all-round and precise information for efficiently guiding farmers and agri-professionals to conduct agricultural processing. Since the existing independent AIS platforms can only offer specific but incomplete agricultural information service, aiming at this issue, the newly proposed AIS system employs ontology techniques, including RDF-based representation and semantic reasoning, to integrate the index information provided by all involved independent agricultural information platforms. As a result, this newly proposed AIS system can provide users with integrated and accurate response information. Through a realistic case study and relevant experiments, it is clear that the accuracy ratio and integrity ratio of response information offered by this ontology-based integrated AIS can be enhanced to a great extent. In summary, not only agri-professionals, but also farmers, who might not understand information retrieval skills, can benefit from this newly proposed AIS to conduct activities in agricultural production life cycle.

Addressing the ‘Tower of Babel’ of pesticide regulations: an ontology for supporting pest-control decisions

“…The contribution of the current research is threefold: first, a pest-control ontology that carries both theoretical and practical implications was developed. On the one hand, it contributes to the existing literature on pest-control ontologies (Beck et al ., 2005; Maliappis, 2009; Li et al ., 2013; Liao et al ., 2015) by adding concepts that have not been covered thus far. On the other hand, the proposed ontology satisfies design criteria (e.g.…”

“…For example, Beck et al (2005) created a crop-pest ontology to foster accurate retrieval of publications and educational resources. Maliappis (2009) and Liao et al (2015) used an ontology that covers, among other things, the crop-pest domain in order to integrate crop-cultivation knowledge from different independent information systems to support farmers in their daily tasks. However, the schemata of the ontologies used in previous studies remained undescribed.…”

“…The increasing use of ontologies is also seen in agriculture (Zhang et al ., 2002; Chang et al ., 2008; Beck et al ., 2010; Roussey et al ., 2010; Song et al ., 2012; Li et al ., 2013; Liao et al ., 2015; Tomic et al ., 2015; Chougule et al ., 2016; Kragt et al ., 2016), where they are used for various purposes such as sharing of agricultural knowledge among farmers around the world (and in different languages) (AGROVOC Thesaurus; Chang et al ., 2008; Maliappis, 2009), creating semantic inter-operability of agricultural systems (Goumopoulos et al ., 2009; Aqeel-ur and Zubair, 2011; Tomic et al ., 2015) and supporting farmer decisions (Gaire et al ., 2013). This trend is not surprising, given that agriculture is a knowledge-centric field that covers many areas of expertise, worldwide practices and technologies, and concepts that are often designated by different names with similar meaning (Palavitsinis and Manouselis, 2014; Liao et al ., 2015) that are fragmented across different systems (Janssen et al ., 2017).…”

A Framework for Evaluating Agricultural Ontologies

“…The increasing use of ontologies is also seen in agriculture (e.g., [4,6,[17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]), where they are used for various purposes, such as agriculture knowledge sharing across farmers around the world and in different languages [18,25,[27][28][29], creating semantic interoperability of agricultural systems [4,22,30,31], and supporting farmer decisions [32] by providing automatic knowledge inference. This is not surprising, given that agriculture is a knowledge-centric field that covers many areas of expertise and many world-wide used practices and technologies.…”

“…This is not surprising, given that agriculture is a knowledge-centric field that covers many areas of expertise and many world-wide used practices and technologies. Agriculture also includes numerous concepts that are often designated by different names with similar meanings [20,33,34], fragmented across different systems [35]. Furthermore, the ability to integrate and harmonize large amounts of agricultural information, originating from a wide range of sources and in various formats, has been recently identified as a key perquisite for sustainable agriculture [36].…”