An Ontological Approach to Meet Information Needs of Farmers in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Abstract. 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.

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

“…To clearly identify the process of the ontology development to represent the information in user context, this section (section II) is mainly organized in six (6) categories such as users' information needs, users' information needs in context, representation of contextualized information, generalizing design approach, and validation and evaluation process. The framework we identified to maintain the ontology for our application is described separately in section III.…”

“…Some examples are given in Table I. In this study we identified that, farm environment, types of farmers, farmers' preferences, and farming stages (considered as the user context model) are the important factors that need to be considered when delivering agricultural information and knowledge to farmers [6].…”

“…users' context model). Since the farmers are the main stakeholders in the agriculture community and other stakeholders are willing to help farmers in various manners, we have identified the users' context specific to the farmers in Sri Lanka such as farm environment, types of farmers, farmers' preferences, and farming stages [6]. The farming stages that we have identified as relating to our application are Crop Selection, Pre-Sowing, Growing, Harvesting, PostHarvesting, and Selling [6].…”

“…We first developed an ontological approach to represent the necessary agricultural information and relevant knowledge within the user context [6]. Using this approach,we designed the ontology to include information needs identified for the first stage of farming life cycle [9].…”

Ontology Design for Thailand Travel Industry

“…It is a combination of different content, information applications, and systems across Internet [6]. Therefore, data management of semantic web should be done in efficient method.…”