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

Abstract

The Agriculture sector plays a vital role in Sri Lanka’s economy. Not having an agricultural knowledge repository that can be easily accessed by people in agriculture community in Sri Lanka within their own context, is a major problem. As a solution, a large user centred ontology for Sri Lankan farmers was developed to provide required information/knowledge not only in a structured and complete way, but also in a context-specific manner. Since this problem is not only limited to farmers, we extend this for every one working in the agriculture domain. We validate the ontology in terms of accuracy and quality. The online knowledge base based on the ontology with a SPARQL endpoint was created to share and reuse the domain knowledge that can be queried based on user context. A Mobile based application and a Web based application were developed to provide information/knowledge by using this ontology. These applications are also used to evaluate the ontology by getting the feedbacks from users to the knowledge in the ontology. It is very difficult to maintain a large complex ontology. To maintain our ontology, we identified various processes that are required to develop and maintain ontology as a collaborative process. A semi-automatic end-to-end ontology management system was developed to manage the developed ontology and the knowledge base. It provides the facilities to reuse, share, modify, extendand prune the ontology components as required. The facilities to capture users’ information needs and search domain information in user context are also included. In this paper, we present a summary of the overall development process of the ontology including the end-to-end ontology management system.