Representing Situational Knowledge for Disease Outbreaks in Agriculture

Abstract

A B S T R A C TWe present a software system for automated projection of situational knowledge for disease outbreak in agriculture. The system supports farmers and agricultural advisers in obtaining and maintaining awareness of present and future disease outbreaks in crops grown at agricultural parcels. It models objects such as plant pathogens and agricultural parcel crops, and their relations, as entities in situations observed by an environmental monitoring system. It utilizes a mechanistic disease pressure model to obtain knowledge about observed situations from forecast data for various weather parameters. It represents obtained situational knowledge explicitly and manages represented knowledge in a knowledge base. We evaluate the system for 3 fungal plant pathogens, 2 cereal crops, and 17 agricultural parcels located in Finland, for a growing season. We underscore how the explicit representation of situational knowledge is useful toward various purposes, including reasoning, query and visualization, and is, thus, vastly superior to having situational knowledge only implicit in high-level data products such as maps.

Theories of Meaning for the Internet of Things

“…In the area of the Internet of Things, certain information systems employ situation semantics as the core of their modeling of user behavior and sensor observations, as well as the basis of context-and situation-awareness (see Heckmann et al 2005;Kokar et al 2009;Stocker et al 2014Stocker et al , 2016. In the following, we will refer to these systems to show how situation semantics addresses the problems of perception, intersubjectivity, and representing dynamics.…”

Assessment of cassava starch biofilm in the quality and shelf life of banana ‘prata’

“…According to [59] by 2050, 70% of the world's population will live in urban areas and a significant factor associated with food insecurity in urban areas is the lack of access to healthy food. Food insecurity is the limitation or uncertainty of the availability of nutritionally adequate and safe food or the limited or uncertain capacity to purchase food in socially acceptable ways [56]. This insecurity is present in several groups, including small farmers, salaried workers, refugees, groups that are not provided for in the urban population in general [16].…”