Design and development of an ontology for an agriculture information system

Abstract

Conceptual structures (Information theory); Knowledge representation (Information theory); Semantic networks (Information theory). Traditional sources of information like books, agricultural extension officer are unable to provide specific information required by a farmer. There is a need to build an ontology based agriculture information system which can provide scientific, relevant and contextual information about various aspects of crop production cycle.

The aim is to develop a domain dependent ontology that will cover various aspects of crop production cycle. AGROVOC vocabulary developed by Food and Agriculture Organization is used for indexing and retrieving data in agricultural information systems. In the proposed research work, AGROVOC is used as base vocabulary to develop the proposed ontology (AGRIont). The ontology is developed by using open source tool Prot´eg´e 3.2. The ontology developed serves as a building block to an agriculture information system that answers the farmer’s queries in their own native language and helps them in making decisions about various aspects of crop production cycle.

In this work, stages of ontology development, structure of ontology developed, architecture, query flow and process of query formulation for the proposed system are discussed in detail. At the end, guidelines to build an ontology, conclusions and future work are given.