Camilo Cornejo

A water conservation digital library using ontologies

New technologies are emerging that assist in organizing and retrieving knowledge stored in a variety of forms (books, papers, models, decision support systems, databases), but they can only be evaluated through real world applications. Ontology has been used to manage the Water Conservation Digital Library holding a growing collection of various types of digital resources in the domain of urban water conservation in Florida, USA. The ontology based back-end powers a fully operational web interface, available at http://library.conservefloridawater.org . The system has already demonstrated numerous benefits of the ontology application, including: easier and more precise finding of resources, information sharing and reuse, and proved to effectively facilitate information management.

Evaluation of Soil Moisture Sensors, and Their Use to Control Irrigation Systems for Containers in the Nursery Industry

Water savings are important from an economical and environmental point of view. The nursery industry accounts for a large amount of the water used for agricultural purposes. The high porosity of substrates used to grow plants in containers affects the precision of moisture sensors, hence the need to evaluate their efficacy in this type of growing media. This paper describes studies that use time domain reflectometry (TDR) and tensiometers as soil moisture sensors in conjunction with a computer controlled irrigation system. Both sensors have their advantages and disadvantages, however, compared against a common timer-controlled system the TDR system accounted for water savings above 60%, and with the tensiometers the savings were around 50%.

On-demand Production of Personalized Illustration-based Extension Manuals

This research project is aim at the development of a computer-based technique that will produce personalized (localized) training material for non-literate users. The tools used for this project will help to manage the content of the training materials, develop a sequence of appropriate illustrations, and convert these to simple, low-cost leaflets. This is a starting point. New ideas and methods will emerge as organizations working in developing countries try out and adapt these tools to their own requirements. This paper presents an approach for managing information and producing localized educational materials by using a database system. It is applied to irrigation and water management information topics and produces illustration (drawing) based training materials for nonliterate farmers.