Ontology based knowledge representation: Case study from agriculture domain

Abstract

The growth of web has touched everyone’s life from an economist, entrepreneur, and academician to a farmer. The agriculture sector is quite important for any country’s growth. Farmers can also be benefited if they are provided with relevant information they need. The reason that it is not happening on a large scale is due to many reasons. Information is available in different formats, platforms and it is highly unstructured. The availability and real time usage of this information is prohibited mainly by the way it is represented. Recently, Ontology has emerged as one of very expressive knowledge representation scheme which enables gathering information from heterogeneous sources and creates a common data model that is shared and agreed upon in diverse domains. The interoperability and deduction capabilities that Ontology offers are very useful for generating new knowledge. Most of the work pertaining to ontology development in agriculture domain is crop specific, where information about fertilizers is confined to a particular crop only. In this paper, we have designed and developed a generic ontology for fertilizers. Fertilizer itself is a concept which should be modeled independently. Even for crop specific ontology, fertilizer is one of the most important concept to be captured. So, it needs to be represented independently. Finding this research gap, an ontology in fertilizer subdomain is developed, taking into account the various issues that are faced while constructing an ontology and the enormous amount of data that is available but is not easy to structure and present in the form of ontology. We have also validated the Ontology using an available tool and domain experts have also validated the developed Ontology.