Fuzzy-Based XML Knowledge Retrieval Methods in Edaphology

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a proficient method for knowledge management in Edaphology to assist the edaphologists and those related with agriculture in a big way. The proposed method mainly consists two sections of which the first one is to build the knowledge base using XML and the latter part deals with information retrieval by searching using fuzzy. Initially, the relational database is converted to the XML database. The paper discusses two algorithms, one is when the soil characteristics are inputted to have the plant list and in the other, plant names are inputted to have the soil characteristics suited for the plant. While retrieving the query result, the crisp numerical values are converted to fuzzy using the triangular fuzzy membership function and matched to those in database. And those which satisfy are added to the result list and subsequently the frequency is found out to rank the result list so as to obtain the final sorted list. Performance metrics used in order to evaluate the method and compare it to baseline paper are number of plants retrieved, ranking efficiency, and computation time and memory usage. Results obtained proved the validity of the method and the method obtained average computation time of 0.102 seconds and average memory usage of 2486 Kb, which all are far better than the previous method results.