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 /

A Sri Lankan one-to-one computing initiative and its impact on formal learning in primary School

One-to-one computing has lately become a frequently used buzzword in the discussions on e-learning in primary education. The main idea in one-to-one computing is to provide every student with a personal computer. This has often been combined with Internet access and the idea to share content but not to share the computers This study has been focused on the Sri Lankan OLPC initiative and data has been gathered from three selected primary schools in the project. In the Sri Lankan OLPC model there is no focus on Internet connectivity and the emphasis is on content development in local languages. Schools chosen in this first one year pilot project are to be classified as to be “the poorest of the poor” and located in rural areas. The research question in this paper is, if and why the introduction of one-to-one computing has had an impact on the formal learning outcomes. All the visited schools have had technical as well as pedagogical problems during the first year, but findings show that there has been an impact on formal learning in subjects like Mathematics and English. We believe that the Sri Lankan emphasis on content development is part of the explanation but also that the strong commitment amongst teachers and parents has contributed. Our recommendation is that this pilot project should be extended but that the focus should be kept on poor schools in non urban areas. We also give some suggestions on how to improve the content development and how to extend the support

Design approaches emerging in developing an agricultural ontology for Sri Lankan farmers

Building an ontology is not a simple task, because ontology development is a craft rather than an engineering activity. Ontology development depends on many factors, for examples, background of the domain experts, engineering techniques, need much time to investigate the domain in detail, and also it is a creative task. Then it is very easy to make mistakes due to lots of various new concepts for many users. Therefore ontology developers and researchers need best practices as well as ontology design patterns to construct good quality ontologies. However, the absence of structured guidelines, methods, and good practices hinders for the development of ontologies. We have developed a large user centered ontology to represent agricultural information and relevant knowledge in user context of Sri Lankan farmers. Through this development we have come across various design models and techniques. In this paper, we have highlighted those models and techniques that will be helpful for the users in the field of ontology development. This discussion is mainly based on three different scenarios. Scenario one mainly concerns for identifying the basic ontology components and their representations. Other scenarios such as event handling for complex real-world situations and conceptualization of overlapping concepts for the farmer location are discussed in detail and represented by using well-known Protégé tool

Developing a community-based knowledge system : a case study using Sri Lankan agriculture

The Agriculture sector plays a vital role in Sri Lanka’s economy. Not having an agricultural knowledge repository that can be easily accessed by people in agriculture community in Sri Lanka within their own context, is a major problem. As a solution, a large user centered ontology for Sri Lankan farmers was developed to provide required information/knowledge not only in a structured and complete way, but also in a context-specific manner. Since this problem is not only limited to farmers, we extend this for every one working in the agriculture domain. We validate the ontology in terms of accuracy and quality. The online knowledge base based on the ontology with a SPARQL endpoint was created to share and reuse the domain knowledge that can be queried based on user context. A Mobile based application and a Web based application were developed to provide information/knowledge by using this ontology. These applications are also used to evaluate the ontology by getting the feedback from users to the knowledge in the ontology. It is very difficult to maintain a large complex ontology. To maintain our ontology, we identified various processes that are required to develop and maintain ontology as a collaborative process. A semi-automatic end-to-end ontology management system was developed to manage the developed ontology and the knowledge base. It provides the facilities to reuse, share, modify, extend and prune the ontology components as required. The facilities to capture users’ information needs and search domain information in user context are also included. In this paper, we present a summary of the overall development process of the ontology including the end-to-end ontology management system

Designing a farmer centred ontology for social life network

Rapid adoption of mobile phones has vastly improved access to information. Yet finding the information within the context in which information is required in a timely manner is a challenge. To investigate some of the underlying farmer centric research challenges a large International Collaborative Research Project to develop mobile based information systems for people in developing countries has been launched. One major sub project is to develop a Social Life Network; a mobile based information system for farmers in Sri Lanka. Lack of timely information with respect to their preferences and needs to support farming activities is creating many problems for farmers in Sri Lanka. 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. As a part of this project we investigated how we can create a knowledge repository of agricultural information to respond to user queries taking into account the context in which the information is needed. Because of the complex nature of the relationships among various concepts we selected an ontological approach that supports first order logic to create the knowledge repository. We first identified set of questions that reflect various motivation scenarios. Next we created a model to represent user context. Then we developed a novel approach to derive the competency questions incorporating user context. These competency questions were used to identify the concepts, relationships and axioms to develop the ontology. Initial system was trialled with a group of farmers in Sri Lanka. There was universal agreement among the farmers participated in the field trial to varying degree (strongly agree, agree, moderately agree) to the question "All information for the crop selection stage is provided"

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

An ontological approach to meet information needs of farmers in Sri Lanka

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. Due to its unstructured and varied format, and lack of targeted delivery methods, this knowledge is not reaching the farmers. Therefore, this knowledge needs to be provided not only in a structured way, but also in a context-specific manner. To address this shortcoming an international collaborative research project was launched to develop a Social Life Network to provide necessary information to farmers using mobile devices. 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 to develop an ontology for agriculture. In this paper we present the approach we used to derive contextual information related to the farmers and the ontological approach that we developed to meet information needs of the farmers at various stages of the farming life cycle

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