Broadening the Research Pathways in Smart Agriculture: Predictive Analysis Using Semiautomatic Information Modeling

Abstract

Agriculture has become more industrialized and intensive due to the rising demand for food in quality and quantity. Agricultural modernization will be made possible by the Internet of Things (IoT), a technology with a great promise for revolutionizing the industry. Agricultural products will be in high demand by 2050 due to a 30% increase in the global population, so there is a need to devise new mechanisms for agriculture, and smart agriculture is one of those mechanisms; however, smart agriculture needs to be explored further to realize its potential fully. So, to explore the potential of this field, the researchers have used a corpus that is extracted from the Scopus database from the year 2008 to the year 2022 and applied the LDA technique. A corpus of 4309 articles was selected from the Scopus database to apply the latent Dirichlet analysis (LDA) model to predict research areas for smart agriculture. Using IoT technology, farmers and producers may better manage their resources, such as fertilizer consumption and the number of trips made by farm vehicles, while minimizing waste and maximizing productivity, including water, electricity, and other inputs. This data-driven experimental study identifies smart agriculture research trends by implementing a topic modeling technique previously used in smart agriculture. The authors have created seventeen research themes in smart agriculture based on the LDA topic modeling. This analysis suggests that the indicated areas are in the growth phase and require further research and exploration.