Gihan N. Wikramanayake

An ontological approach to meet information needs of farmers in sri lanka

Farmers in Sri Lanka are badly affected by not being able to get vital information required to support their farming activities in a timely manner. Some of the required information can be found in government websites, agriculture department leaflets, and through radio and television programs on agriculture. Due to its unstructured and varied format, and lack of targeted delivery methods, this knowledge is not reaching the farmers. Therefore, this knowledge needs to be provided not only in a structured way, but also in a context-specific manner. To address this shortcoming an international collaborative research project was launched to develop a Social Life Network to provide necessary information to farmers using mobile devices. Agricultural information has strong local characteristics in relation to climate, culture, history, languages, and local plant varieties. These local characteristics as well as the need to provide information in a context-specific manner made us to develop an ontology for agriculture. In this paper we present the approach we used to derive contextual information related to the farmers and the ontological approach that we developed to meet information needs of the farmers at various stages of the farming life cycle.

Farmer response towards the initial agriculture information dissemination mobile prototype

Timely and relevant agriculture information is essential for farmers to make effective decisions. Finding the right approach to provide this information to empower farmers is vital due to the high failure rate in current agricultural information systems. As most farmers now have mobile phones we developed a mobile based information system. We used participatory action research methodology to enable high farmer participation to ensure sustainability of the solution. The initial version of the application based on the preliminary studies focused on the crop choosing stage of the farming life cycle. This initial prototype was evaluated with a sample of farmers to check their willingness in adapting such technology, usefulness of provided information and usability of the application in order to support their day to day decision making process. The sample group strongly endorsed the various aspects of the prototype application and provided valuable insights for improvement.

User centered ontology for Sri Lankan farmers

Abstract Farmers in Sri Lanka are badly affected by not being able to get vital information required to support their farming activities in a timely manner. Some of the required information can be found in government websites, agriculture department leaflets, and through radio and television programs on agriculture. This knowledge is not reaching the farmers due to its unstructured, incomplete, varied formats, and lack of targeted delivery methods. Thus finding the right information within the context in which information is required in a timely manner is a challenge. The information and knowledge needs to be provided not only in a structured and complete way, but also in a context-specific manner. For instance, farmers need agricultural information within the context of location of their farm land, their economic condition, their interest and beliefs, and available agricultural equipment. To investigate some of the underlying farmer centric research challenges an International Collaborative Research Project to develop mobile based information systems for people in developing countries has been launched. Farmer centered ontology was developed as part of this project. Agricultural information has strong local characteristics in relation to climate, culture, history, languages, and local plant varieties. These local characteristics as well as the need to provide information in a context-specific manner made us develop this user centered ontology for Sri Lankan farmers. Because of the complex nature of the relationships among various concepts we selected an ontological approach that supports description logic to create the knowledge repository. For this we developed a new approach to model the domain knowledge to meet particular access requirements of the farmers in Sri Lanka. Through this approach, we have investigated how to create a knowledge repository of agricultural information to respond to user queries taking into account the context in which information is needed by farmers at various stages of the farming life cycle. The Delphi Method and the OOPS! (web-based tool) were used to validate the ontology. Initial system was trialed with a group of farmers in Sri Lanka. The online knowledge base with a SPARQL endpoint was created to share and reuse the domain knowledge that can be queried based on farmer context.

Building social life networks through mobile interfaces : the case study of Sri Lanka farmers

The development of mobile applications is paramount to support users living in developing countries to improve their lives. One of the major research challenges is to develop a user interface suitable for such users. In this chapter we present the design process we applied in order to develop a mobile application oriented to farmers living in Sri Lanka. The application prototype developed so far has been evaluated against usability requirements and a usability evaluation framework has been devised, which can be used to replicate the tests as the application iteratively reaches its final release. This work represents a pilot study within a wider international research project aiming to provide real-time information to support activities related to livelihood delivered using mobile phone applications targeted to meet the needs of people in developing countries.

Conceptualizing crop life cycle events to create a user centered ontology for farmers

People need contextualized information and knowledge to make better decisions. In case of farmers, the information that they require is available through agricultural websites, agriculture department leaflets and mass media. However, available information and knowledge are general, incomplete, heterogeneous, and unstructured. Since the farmers need the information and knowledge within their own context and need to represent information in complete and structured manner we developed a farmer centered ontology in the domain of agriculture. Because of the data complexity of the relationships among various concepts, to attenuate the incompleteness of the data, and also to add semantics and background knowledge about the domain we have selected a logic based ontological approach to create our knowledge repository. In this study, we have investigated how to model the actual representation of the domain and its challenges. The internal evaluation has been done to test the usefulness of the ontology during the design process. We have developed the online knowledge base that can be queried based on the farmer context.

Digital Knowledge Ecosystem for Achieving Sustainable Agriculture Production: A Case Study from Sri Lanka

Crop production problems are common in Sri Lanka which severely effect rural farmers, agriculture sector and the countrys economy as a whole. A deeper analysis revealed that the root cause was farmers and other stakeholders in the domain not receiving right information at the right time in the right format. Inspired by the rapid growth of mobile phone usage among farmers a mobile-based solution is sought to overcome this information gap. Farmers needed published information (quasi static) about crops, pests, diseases, land preparation, growing and harvesting methods and real-time situational information (dynamic) such as current crop production and market prices. This situational information is also needed by agriculture department, agro-chemical companies, buyers and various government agencies to ensure food security through effective supply chain planning whilst minimising waste. We developed a notion of context specific actionable information which enables user to act with least amount of further processing. User centered agriculture ontology was developed to convert published quasi static information to actionable information. We adopted empowerment theory to create empowerment-oriented farming processes to motivate farmers to act on this information and aggregated the transaction data to generate situational information. This created a holistic information flow model for agriculture domain similar to energy flow in biological ecosystems. Consequently, the initial Mobile-based Information System evolved into a Digital Knowledge Ecosystem that can predict current production situation in near real enabling government agencies to dynamically adjust the incentives offered to farmers for growing different types of crops to achieve sustainable agriculture production through crop diversification.

Architecting secure Web Services through policies

As Web services begin to dominate the market of distributed computing, securing the pipelines from intruders is becoming a mission, which cannot be considered as trivial anymore. As businesses adopt web services due to its very attractive features like platform independency, ease of implementation, unprecedented support from major vendors and ability of seamlessly interfacing with legacy systems, they unsuspectingly expose themselves into a zone filled with security loop holes which can pose a great threat to confidential data which might be travelling through the channels using these services. This paper proposes a comprehensive security solution for securing Web services through the use of policies. In an era where Web services are building bridges across heterogeneous systems the need of a security solution, which can seamlessly integrate itself into the existing Web service infrastructures of businesses, is becoming more and more apparent. Thus a solution, which can be easily incorporated into the existing infrastructures with minimum cost and effort on the part of the developers and businesses are proposed here.

A Framework for End-to-End Ontology Management System

An Ontology once developed needs to be kept up-to-date preferably as a collaborative process which will require web based tools. We have developed a large user centered ontology for Sri Lankan agriculture domain to represent agricultural information and relevant knowledge that can be queried in user context. We have generalized our design approach. In doing so we have identified various processes that are required to manage an ontology as a collaborative process. Based on these processes we developed an ontology management system to manage the ontology life cycle. The main processes such as modify, extend and prune the ontology components as required are included. It also has facilities to capture users’ information needs in context for modifications, search domain information, reuse and share the ontological knowledge. This is a semi-automatic ontology management system that helps to develop and manage complex real-world applications based ontologies collaboratively.

Interplay of Requirements Engineering and Human Computer Interaction Approaches in the Evolution of a Mobile Agriculture Information System

Very high adoption of mobile phones in developing countries can be used to empower people engaged in various sectors such as agriculture, fisheries and healthcare by providing timely information in right context, thus facilitating them to make informed decisions. Having identified lack of such information is badly affecting farmers in Sri Lanka we embarked on a project to develop a mobile based agriculture information system. We had to combine different theories and methods both from Requirements Engineering (RE) and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) on a need basis to successfully gather the requirements. When we retraced the process we saw a definitive systematic pattern as to how RE and HCI can be used to enrich such an artefact; highlighting the strong interplay between RE and HCI. Discovery of this pattern enabled us to generalise the process.

Optimal selection of failure data for reliability estimation based on a standard deviation method

Software reliability is one of software quality factors and it mostly concerns with the failures of the software. Software failures cost money and it affects to the customer satisfaction, as a result the reliability practice is important. However it is evident to say that software reliability practice in the industry is poor. Impairment of accuracy and the complexity of calculations are some of reasons for lack of applicability. Software reliability is estimated using software reliability estimation models based on observed failure data. The software failure behavior change as a result of software code changes during the testing and is a limitation of most reliability estimation models. This fact has not been considered in most of the reliability models. Our study introduces a simple and accurate method for optimal data selection. The optimal failure data are selected based on the fact that the mean is an estimator for sample data and standard deviation is an estimator for variation of sample data from the mean value. The variation of failure data reflects the fact that the software failure behavior is changed during the testing due to the changes that takes place in code. This variation is examined based on the plotted mean values of time to failure and standard deviation values of time to failure against the failure number in the same graph. This novel method for optimal selection of failure data is simple and accurate method.