Integrated Ontology for Agricultural Domain

Abstract

provide a shared and common understanding of a domain that can be communicated between people and across application systems. An ontology for a certain domain can be created from scratch or by merging existing ontologies in the same domain. Establishing ontology from scratch is hard and expensive. Multiple ontologies of different systems for the same domain may be dissimilar, thus, various parties with different ontologies do not fully understand each other in spite of these ontologies are for the same domain. To solve this problem, it is necessary to integrate these ontologies. Integrated ontology, should be consistent and has no redundancy. This work presents a semi-automated system for building an integrated ontology by matching and merging existing ontologies. The proposed system has been applied on the agricultural domain for Faba Bean crop to get a dynamic integrated ontology, it can be applied also on all crops whatever field crops or horticulture crops. Source ontologies in the proposed system have been implemented in XML language. CommonKADS Methodology has been used in building the target ontology. CommonKADS Methodology deals with the following kinds of entities: Concepts, properties, and values. The proposed system proposed a technique to solve the matching and merging problems by using a multi-matching technique to find the correspondences between entities in the source ontologies and merging technique which deals with concepts, properties, values and hierarchical classifications. The outcome of the proposed system is an integrated ontology in hierarchical classification of the concepts .