Semantic Description of Plant Phenological Development Stages, Starting with Grapevine

Abstract

The French project Data to Knowledge in Agronomy and Biodiversity (D2KAB) will make available a semantically-enabled French agricultural alert newsletter. In order to describe/annotate crop phenological development stages in the newsletters, we need a specific semantic resource to semantically represent each stages. Several scales already exist to describe plant phenological development stages. BBCH, considered a reference, offers several sets of stages –one per crop called ‘individual scales’–and a general one. The French Wine and Vine Institute (IFV) has aligned several existing scales in order to identify the most useful grapevine development stages for agricultural practices. Unfortunately these scales are not available in a semantic form preventing their use in agricultural semantic applications. In this paper, we present our work of creating an ontological framework for semantic description of plant development stages and transforming specific scales into RDF vocabularies; we introduce the BBCH-based Plant Phenological Description Ontology and we illustrate this framework with four scales related to grapevine.

Thesaurus Enrichment via Coordination Extraction

“…Our test corpus holds 880 PHB files with an average of 2548 tokens per file, each covering di↵erent sectors of French agriculture. The PHB files have been collected during various periods from 2009 15 and transformed from their initial PDF format into an HTML format using a conversion tool named pdf2blocks 16 . Our system applies on standard methods of text preprocessing (sentence segmentation, word tokenization, part-of-speech tagging) and also takes into account issues after the conversion from PDF.…”

“…FCU was first built to annotate French agricultural alert bulletins in the Vespa project [14]. It is also reused to identify crops when French agricultural reference datasets are published on the Web using semantic Web technologies, like the plant phenological scales [15]. The enrichment of the thesaurus was based on a manual review of reference agricultural documents.…”

OntoCSA

“…Although the semantic modelling of agriculture has attracted researchers in recent years (Ramar & Gurunathan, 2017;Jebaraj & Sathiaseelan, 2017;Goldstein et al, 2019;Drury et al, 2019;Kessler et al, 2021;Roussey et al, 2021;Abayomi-Alli et al, 2021) and has resulted in the development of ontologies for agriculture (Hu et al, 2011;Kim et al, 2013;Jebaraj & Sathiaseelan, 2017;Ngo et al, 2018;Arnaud et al, 2020;Jachimczyk et al, 2021;Nidhi et al, 2021), no research to date has focused on building a knowledge base ontology for the CSA domain. This study attempts to fill this gap through the development of a Climate Smart Agriculture Ontology (OntoCSA).…”