Ontology based expert system for Barley grain classification

Accurate and efficient assessment of barley quality is crucial for brewery industry. Currently, such the assessment is performed by a qualified expert, is expensive, time-consuming and may yield unreproducible results. We introduce a barley ontology (BO) to formalize the expert's knowledge and to involve information from industry standards. The BO specifies quality classes of malting barley, their attributes and relations. Moreover, we present an expert system to classify barley kernels, which is based on the ontology. The expert system enables correct classification of grains from plain visual attributes evaluated by non-expert volunteers.