User centered ontology for Sri Lankan agriculture domain

People working in the agriculture domain in Sri Lanka are affected by not being able to get vital information required to support their domain related activities in a timely manner. Some of the required information can be found in government websites, agriculture department leaflets, newspapers, etc. The required information is hard to find from these knowledge sources due to its unstructured, incomplete, varied formats, and lack of targeted delivery methods. Thus finding the right information within the context in which information is required in a timely manner is a challenge. The required information and relevant knowledge needs to be provided not only in a structured and complete way, but also in a context-specific manner. To investigate some of the underlying research challenges an International Collaborative Research Project to develop mobile based information systems for people in developing countries was launched. User centered Ontology was developed as a part of this project. We developed a new approach to model the domain knowledge to meet particular access requirements of the users in agriculture domain in Sri Lanka. Through this approach, we have investigated how to create a knowledge repository of agricultural information to respond to user queries taking into account the context in which information is needed by them at various stages of the farming life cycle. The Delphi Method, Modified Delphi Method and the OOPS! (web-based tool) were used to validate the quality of the ontology. Initial system was trialed with a group of farmers in Sri Lanka. The online knowledge base with a SPARQL endpoint was created to share and reuse the domain knowledge that can be queried based on user context. A semi-automatic end-to-end ontology management system was developed to manage the developed ontology as well as the knowledge base. It provides the facilities to reuse, share, modify, extend, and prune the ontology components as required

Conceptualizing crop life cycle events to create a user centered ontology for farmers

People need contextualized information and knowledge to make better decisions. In case of farmers, the information that they require is available through agricultural websites, agriculture department leaflets and mass media. However, available information and knowledge are general, incomplete, heterogeneous, and unstructured. Since the farmers need the information and knowledge within their own context and need to represent information in complete and structured manner we developed a farmer centered ontology in the domain of agriculture. Because of the data complexity of the relationships among various concepts, to attenuate the incompleteness of the data, and also to add semantics and background knowledge about the domain we have selected a logic based ontological approach to create our knowledge repository. In this study, we have investigated how to model the actual representation of the domain and its challenges. The internal evaluation has been done to test the usefulness of the ontology during the design process. We have developed the online knowledge base that can be queried based on the farmer context

User centered ontology for Sri Lankan farmers

Farmers in Sri Lanka are badly affected by not being able to get vital information required to support their farming activities in a timely manner. Some of the required information can be found in government websites, agriculture department leaflets, and through radio and television programs on agriculture. This knowledge is not reaching the farmers due to its unstructured, incomplete, varied formats, and lack of targeted delivery methods. Thus finding the right information within the context in which information is required in a timely manner is a challenge. The information and knowledge needs to be provided not only in a structured and complete way, but also in a context-specific manner. For instance, farmers need agricultural information within the context of location of their farm land, their economic condition, their interest and beliefs, and available agricultural equipment. To investigate some of the underlying farmer centric research challenges an International Collaborative Research Project to develop mobile based information systems for people in developing countries has been launched. Farmer centered ontology was developed as part of this project. Agricultural information has strong local characteristics in relation to climate, culture, history, languages, and local plant varieties. These local characteristics as well as the need to provide information in a context-specific manner made us develop this user centered ontology for Sri Lankan farmers. Because of the complex nature of the relationships among various concepts we selected an ontological approach that supports description logic to create the knowledge repository. For this we developed a new approach to model the domain knowledge to meet particular access requirements of the farmers in Sri Lanka. Through this approach, we have investigated how to create a knowledge repository of agricultural information to respond to user queries taking into account the context in which information is needed by farmers at various stages of the farming life cycle. The Delphi Method and the OOPS! (web-based tool) were used to validate the ontology. Initial system was trialed with a group of farmers in Sri Lanka. The online knowledge base with a SPARQL endpoint was created to share and reuse the domain knowledge that can be queried based on farmer context

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

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