An ontology-based decision support system for the management of home gardens

Abstract

Home gardens or family gardens are the oldest cultivation systems used in the world. The home garden has different goals which gone from leisure and recreation to self-consumption, healthy production, family savings and community integration. Home garden management has become a knowledge problem since the community needs to know what vegetables can be planted as well as the activities that must be performed according to different parameters such as illumination, harvest time, irrigation time, among others. In this sense, there is a clear need for new mechanisms in which experts’ knowledge are integrated to support decision making in the context of the home garden. In this work, we present a DSS focused on the management of home gardens. This system takes advantages of semantic technologies, more specifically ontologies, to model the main activities related to the home garden management such as creation, irrigation, transplanting and harvesting. The DSS proposed was evaluated in the context of medicinal plants and vegetables obtaining encouraging results.