Semantic Web Based Integrated Agriculture Information Framework

Information Technology in agriculture is intended to provide knowledge to the farmers in order to make more informed and valuable decisions. In this paper we present an Integrated Agriculture Information Framework (IAIF) to enable knowledge extraction from multiple domain related repositories. IAIF has been designed and developed with the core aim of meaningfully representing combining, merging and aggregating the data present in existing knowledge repositories through the use of metadata and domain ontologies. The domain ontology serves to link the resources with the domain knowledge with the help of respective metadata. A key feature of the semantics based approach adopted is that ontology also serves as the basis for capturing the needed information for accessing different types of data sources. We also present an Ontology engineering methodology for the domain that allows for formalized modeling of domain schema and resource knowledge. In addition, we discuss the methodology for linking multiple types of knowledge resources.