The Onto-CropBase – A semantic web application for querying crops linked-data

Abstract

The lack of formal technical knowledge has been identified as one of the constraints to research and development on a group of crops collectively referred to as underutilized crops. Some information about these crops is available in informal sources on the web, for example on Wikipedia. However, this knowledge is not entirely authoritative, it may be incomplete and/or inconsistent and for these reasons it is not suitable as a basis of decision making by crop growers. Alternatively, we present an ontology-driven tool as a web-based access point for underutilized-crops ontology model. Major discussion points in this paper highlight our design choices, the tool implementation and a preliminary validation of the tool with brief discussion of related developments.