Achieving Agriculture Biotic Sustainability through Mobile-based Information System: Adapting the characteristics of Geographical Information Systems (GIS)

Agriculture is the foundation of the economy in Sri Lanka. Presently, many factors affect agriculture production leading to crop losses and food waste in Sri Lanka. An in-depth study of these factors exposed that the root causes were the improper agricultural practices followed by the farmers and inaccessibility to the required information at the right time for optimal decision-making. As a solution, earlier, a mobile-based application called Govi Nena was developed for farmers in Sri Lanka. In this work, we have extended the earlier version of the application to suit the different needs of farmers. This extension includes delivering the required information similar to how the information is delivered in GIS and a new module for farmers to manage real-time pest/disease incidences. Finally, the prototyped version of the application was tested among several farmers in Sri Lanka to understand the suitability of the work concerning farmers\u27 requirements

GSU Event Portal

GSU Event Portal is web application used for organizing various events around the world. Events include work by three different roles, admin, organizer and visitor. This web application offers a very interactive user interface, so that every user can easily navigate to every corner of the website and explore all the functionalities. It consists of advanced functionalities like searching for the events, registration, editing profiles, sorting, showing event location on map etc. The goal of this application is to take service to the fingertips of user and provide all the services like event registration, secure digital payment, cancellation, refunds, and also designing a forum where users can interact with other users about the events and any other concerns. Admin can manage everything in the website. Functionalities for admin include approving the event, deleting the event, managing organizers, managing user data, managing transactions etc. Role of the organizers are limited to their own events. They have full control for their events like viewing registrations, user details, payments etc. and additionally they have functionalities to create new events or modify current events. Functionalities for visitors include viewing all the available events, searching for events, registering for interested events, contacting organizers, paying for events etc

Towards An Agriculture Information Ecosystem

Stakeholders of a domain in their day today activities generate information which is a valuable resource. To obtain full value of this information it should reach right people at the right time. To investigate how this can be achieved we developed an information flow model for agriculture domain by mapping information needed by stakeholders to information generated by others using set of aggregation and disaggregation operators. We found majority of information needs of stakeholders can be fulfilled by applying these operators to information produced by some other stakeholders thus creating a direct benefit to encourage sharing information. This information flow model had many similarities to biological ecosystems where nutrient cycles and energy flows are replaced by information flows. Based on this information ecosystem model we are developing a mobile based information system for farmers in Sri Lanka. Like biological ecosystems information ecosystems will also need time to grow and become sustainable

Towards using ICT to Enhance Flow of Information to aid Farmer Sustainability in Sri Lanka

Farmers need information at all stages of the farming life cycle to make optimal decisions. The required information includes not only prior knowledge but also real time (dynamic) information such as market prices and current production levels. Some valuable information needed by the farmers is produced by government organizations and is available in different locations in different formats. Although farmer is the most important stakeholder in agriculture, there has not been much effort to provide the essential information to farmers on a real time basis. This lack of information is creating many difficulties for farmers as they are not being able to make the correct decisions relating to their farming activities. Through field studies we have identified information required by farmers at various stages of the farming cycle and official sources where this information is available. Next we developed an information flow model that connects various information sources to farmers’ information needs. Based on these findings we are now developing a mobile phone based information system to deliver the required information to farmers in real time

Chemical composition and biological properties of etlingera elatior jack. (torch ginger) inflorescence.

Etlingera elatior Jack. (bunga kantan) dianalisis dari segi komposisi kimia dan ciri biologi (antioksidan dan antimikrob) bagi mengenalpasti potensinya sebagai sumber nutraseutikal. Penilaian dijalankan dengan menggunakan sistem pelarut yang berbeza [metanol, aseton (50%, 90% dan 100% v/v) dan air suling] untuk mengekstrak beberapa komponen antioksidan (jumlah fenol, tanin, flavonoid, dan antosianin) dan aktiviti antioksidan (peratus DPHH aktiviti perencatan radikal dan kuasa penurunan asei antioksidan ferik (FRAP)). Inflorescence of Etlingera elatior Jack. (torch ginger/ kantan) was evaluated for its chemical composition and biological properties (antioxidant and antimicrobial) to assess this plant material as a source of nutraceutical. Using different solvent systems [methanol, acetone (50%, 90% and 100% v/v) and distilled water] the extractability of some of the antioxidant compounds (total phenols, tannins, flavonoids, anthocyanins) and antioxidant activity (percent DPPH radical scavenging activity and ferric reducing antioxidant power (FRAP)) were evaluated

An ontological clinical decision support system based on clinical guidelines for diabetes patients in Sri Lanka

Health professionals should follow the clinical guidelines to decrease healthcare costs to avoid unnecessary testing and to minimize the variations among healthcare providers. In addition, this will minimize the mistakes in diagnosis and treatment processes. To this end, it is possible to use Clinical Decision Support Systems that implement the clinical guidelines. Clinical guidelines published by international associations are not suitable for developing countries such as Sri Lanka, due to the economic background, lack of resources, and unavailability of some laboratory tests. Hence, a set of clinical guidelines has been formulated based on the various published international professional organizations from a Sri Lankan context. Furthermore, these guidelines are usually presented in non-computer-interpretable narrative text or non-executable flow chart formats. In order to fill this gap, this research study finds a suitable approach to represent/organize the clinical guidelines in a Sri Lankan context that is suitable to be used in a clinical decision support system. To this end, we introduced a novel approach which is an ontological model based on the clinical guidelines. As it is revealed that there are 4 million diabetes patients in Sri Lanka, which is approximately twenty percent of the total population, we used diabetes-related guidelines in this research. Firstly, conceptual models were designed to map the acquired diabetes-related clinical guidelines using Business Process Model and Notation 2.0. Two models were designed in mapping the diagnosis process of Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes, and Gestational diabetes. Furthermore, several conceptual models were designed to map the treatment plans in guidelines by using flowcharting. These designs were validated by domain experts by using questionnaires. Grüninger and Fox’s method was used to design and evaluate the ontology based on the designed conceptual models. Domain experts’ feedback and several real-life diabetic scenarios were used to validate and evaluate the developed ontology. The evaluation results show that all suggested answers based on the proposed ontological model are accurate and well addressed with respect to the real-world scenarios. A clinical decision support system was implemented based on the ontological knowledge base using the Jena Framework, and this system can be used to access the diabetic information and knowledge in the Sri Lankan context. However, this contribution is not limited to diabetes or a local context, and can be applied to any disease or any context

Towards using ICT to enhance flow of information to aid farmer sustainability in Sri Lanka

Farmers need information at all stages of the farming life cycle to make optimal decisions. The required information includes not only prior knowledge but also real time (dynamic) information such as market prices and current production levels. Some valuable information needed by the farmers is produced by government organizations and is available in different locations in different formats. Although farmer is the most important stakeholder in agriculture, there has not been much effort to provide the essential information to farmers on a real time basis. This lack of information is creating many difficulties for farmers as they are not being able to make the correct decisions relating to their farming activities. Through field studies we have identified information required by farmers at various stages of the farming cycle and official sources where this information is available. Next we developed an information flow model that connects various information sources to farmers&rsquo; information needs. Based on these findings we are now developing a mobile phone based information system to deliver the required information to farmers in real time.<br /

Digitally-enabled crop disorder management process based on farmer empowerment for improved outcomes : a case study from Sri Lanka

We have developed a system facilitated by a mobile artefact to effectively identify crop disorder incidents and manage them using recommended control measures. This work overcomes the limitations of the existing attempts by using digital technology to empower farmers to identify crop disorders rather than replace them with automated techniques. Our approach empowers farmers by providing the information in context for them to identify crop disorders. The developed solution can identify most of the crop disorders instantaneously, irrespective of the crop or other factors that make crop disorder identification complicated. For the rest, it provides a mechanism to carry out a manual identification with the help of subject experts. The solution was deployed among paddy farmers in Sri Lanka to understand how well this could assist them in identifying and managing crop disorders. The system was able to identify 70.8% of the crop disorder incidents reported by the farmers and provided them with the relevant control measures. Farmers’ perceptions of various usability aspects of the solution revealed that the application of agrochemicals and expenses associated with agrochemicals were significantly reduced. It was also observed that the yield quality and quantity and overall revenue have increased compared to the previous seasons

Towards an agriculture knowledge ecosystem :A social life network for farmers in Sri Lanka

We have developed and successfully trialled a Social Life Network (SLN); a Mobile Based Information System to support farming activities in Sri Lanka. It provides information required to support activities such as crop selection and cultivation planning in the context of farmer, farm location, season and task being performed. The system also provides a facility for farmers to sell farming related products and services to other farmers. The final system architecture evolved through a series of iterative relevance and design cycles based on Design Science Research methodology. In the first relevance cycle we identified farmer information needs, their current decision making patterns, and some possible ways to enhance their decision making process. In the first design cycles we developed the initial prototype to visualise a possible solution and in subsequent cycles a crop ontology to reorganise published crop information that would be queried in context and processes to empower farmers. Next we went through 2 cycles of creating functional prototypes, field testing with farmers and improving these to arrive at the final system. We noted that this system can enhance the flow of information in the agriculture domain by aggregating or disaggregating information produced by some stakeholders to be consumed by others. Based on this observation the overall architecture was reconceptualised as a Digital Knowledge Ecosystem