Development of Contextual Crop Ontology for Effective Information Retrieval

Abstract

Agriculture in India has a diversity of natural elements such as wider cultivable land, different agro-climatic zones, different soil types, and suitable seasons for cultivating a variety of crops. Indian agriculture is largely reliant on natural resources and favorable weather conditions. Therefore, under a vast agricultural diversity, strong information support and knowledge system are required for the farmer community to achieve a high yield. Accurate and timely information and instruction are vital to the agricultural processes that should be delivered to farmers properly. The available agricultural websites, mobile applications, and software provide only general practices to the farmers and do not address the solution for specific problems. So there is a need for a system that should give contextual information based on geographical area, climatic condition, soil nature, previous experience, and current state of the crop. The information provided by the system can be applied for their cultivation and marketing. The system is designed by using ontology for the agriculture domain and thereby providing information retrieval for this RDF repository. In this paper, farmer-based crop ontology is developed that will be useful for guiding the farmers by providing instructions and information related to crop cultivation and management of fertilizers based on their situation of the crop developing stage.