Agro advisory system for cotton crop

In the agricultural domain, the main challenge is to present the new information and research to the farmers so that they can leverage the power of ICT to improve their agricultural practices and thereby the production. Huge amount of agriculture related data like weather data, soil health records, cropping pattern, location specific crop disease and pest are collected from different sources like services, remote satellites, and network of sensors. An agro advisory system presented in this paper helps to bridge the gap between farmers and the agriculture domain experts and developed for the cotton farmers in Gujarat region of India. The system consists of three basic components; Cotton Ontology, Web Services, and Mobile Application Development. The cotton ontology maintains domain knowledge required for answering farmer queries. The ontology contains information regarding crop, soil, cultivation process, disease, pest, and other relevant information. Protégé ontology development tool is used to develop this ontology. Appropriate Web services were built which help interactions with different data sources. The RESTful Web services are programmed in Java using the JAX-RS/Jersey API and the Eclipse EE IDE. The services are developed and deployed on a cloud based application server provided by Heroku. The Web services are invoked from the mobile device and in turn they connect to various data sources like Open Weather API, SQL database and the Ontologies. The farmers can use this application based on very simple android mobile interfaces. The prototype is developed using Java, Android SDK - v14 and Eclipse IDE.