An ontology model to assess the agro-climatic and edaphic feasibility of a location for rubber cultivation

Abstract

One of the important commercial agricultural products is rubber. It is collected from the latex of the tree Hevea Brasiliensis. Because of the rubber’s invaluable qualities such as non-conduction of electricity, elasticity and resistance to water it is used for different purposes. During the last five decades, natural rubber has achieved the highest growth among major crops in the country in terms of expansion area, production and productivity. Sowing, tapping and processing are some common methods of rubber cultivation.Rubber cultivation is considered as an important source of income for rural communities. Various agro-climatic factors such as temperature, latitude, water availability, altitude, wind and edaphic factors such as soil drainage, slope, soil type, soil depth, soil water table and pH have to be considered to find the feasibility of an area for rubber cultivation. In this paper, ontology is constructed to assess the edaphic and agro-climatic feasibility of an area for rubber cultivation. Carefully-collected knowledge that is very domain-sensitive is required for constructing ontology. Ontology contains domain specific knowledge to increase the powerfulness of a particular search engine. Based on the constructed ontology, the edaphic and agro-climatic feasibility of an area is assessed for rubber cultivation.