User centered ontology for Sri Lankan agriculture domain

People working in the agriculture domain in Sri Lanka are affected by not being able to get vital information required to support their domain related activities in a timely manner. Some of the required information can be found in government websites, agriculture department leaflets, newspapers, etc. The required information is hard to find from these knowledge sources due to its unstructured, incomplete, varied formats, and lack of targeted delivery methods. Thus finding the right information within the context in which information is required in a timely manner is a challenge. The required information and relevant knowledge needs to be provided not only in a structured and complete way, but also in a context-specific manner. To investigate some of the underlying research challenges an International Collaborative Research Project to develop mobile based information systems for people in developing countries was launched. User centered Ontology was developed as a part of this project. We developed a new approach to model the domain knowledge to meet particular access requirements of the users in agriculture domain in Sri Lanka. Through this approach, we have investigated how to create a knowledge repository of agricultural information to respond to user queries taking into account the context in which information is needed by them at various stages of the farming life cycle. The Delphi Method, Modified Delphi Method and the OOPS! (web-based tool) were used to validate the quality of the ontology. Initial system was trialed with a group of farmers in Sri Lanka. The online knowledge base with a SPARQL endpoint was created to share and reuse the domain knowledge that can be queried based on user context. A semi-automatic end-to-end ontology management system was developed to manage the developed ontology as well as the knowledge base. It provides the facilities to reuse, share, modify, extend, and prune the ontology components as required.