Task Ontology Modeling for Technical Knowledge Representation in Agriculture Field Operations Domain

Nowadays, ontologies have been used to describe knowledge in a wide quantity of domains. Knowledge discovery, reuse and share benefits are a common sense among information systems developers and there are many works related to ontology engineering, conceptual modeling, metadata and semantic representation in the computational systems area. Although there are many ontologies to describe the vocabulary related to generic domains such as medicine, law, engineering and biology, there are no specific ontologies to describe generic task vocabularies like agriculture field operations. This paper describes a model to represent the technical knowledge for the agriculture field operations as a task ontology that can be used with a domain ontology to build an application ontology for agriculture domain purposes. The field operations were analyzed to determine who are the task agents, agent roles, the input resources, task and sub-task decomposition, control-flow, task concepts, attributes and relations. As a result, a formal representation of the agriculture field operations is presented and a conceptual model was built using UML class and activity diagrams. The model consistency was verified in a case study of the sugar cane harvest operation. The model presented describes the domain operations knowledge and it could be the base for the development of computational application systems as field operations control, decision support and precision agriculture.