Jeevani S. Goonetillake

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.

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.

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.

Design science research based blended approach for usability driven requirements gathering and application development

Extracting user requirements in designing innovative ICT based solutions for emerging vague problems is a challenge. We successfully addressed this challenge by blending several techniques in Software Engineering (SE) and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) within a Design Science Research (DSR) framework. These techniques were traditional surveys and interviews, causal analysis, scenario creation and transformation, use of paper-based and functional prototypes for communicating with users and capturing their feedback, user centered design, and incremental development. This approach enabled us to better capture requirements based on usability aspects and guided us to design a successful solution. We present a framework derived from this research for wider applicability.

A HOLISTIC MOBILE BASED INFORMATION SYSTEM TO ENHANCE FARMING ACTIVITIES IN SRI LANKA

Information technology has proved to be the most vital part in sustainable development of any domain. In the next era, mobile technologies will create a greater impact on the humans due to inbuilt sensors and processing capabilities. Thus, by identifying this trend we have designed a holistic mobile based system to aid the information needs of farmers throughout the farming life cycle. This system is aimed at addressing the information gap among farmers and other stakeholders of the agriculture sector such as traders, government and private organizations. While diagnosing the problem domain, it was identified that, not only the static information such as pest and diseases, but also the dynamic information such as market prices, should be made available to the farmer to take correct decisions at the right time. Thus, our system would gather data from different sources to create better linkages among the stakeholders of the agriculture domain while increasing the information transparency of the farming life cycle. Further, the intended design will open up opportunities for predictive models to strengthen the decision making process.

Event Detection over Continuous Data Stream for the Sustainable Growth in Agriculture Context

The coordination failure is a concept that explains the failure of people to coordinate and act on a real-world problem properly. The failure of coordination among human communities can lead to social problems in many domains including in transportation, health care, disaster management, agriculture etc. and ultimately affects the sustainable growth of a country as a whole. The recent advancements in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have introduced a new trend called Collaborative Consumption - the peer-to-peer based coordination and sharing of information through online by human communities has been expected to solve these social problems identified in the above domains. The tremendous adaptation of people towards ICTs ultimately resulted in huge, fast-moving and heterogeneous data contributed by people in a collaborative manner. In here, most of these data describe real-time events associated with the people based on their context. The way of coordinating user communities to contribute data, detecting events from it and effective delivery of required information to needful parties would be a possible solution to overcome the coordination problem. In this paper, the result of a systematic literature review is performed to understand the current state of the event detection methods used in information systems. Furthermore, we have proposed a user centered mobile based information system that assists the detection of pest outbreak events in agriculture domain for an effective and timely delivery of actionable information to farmers.

Harnessing Mobile Pervasive Computing to Enhance Livelihood Processes: Farmer Response to a Mobile Agriculture Information System

Mobile technology is a remarkable milestone in the current advances in Information and Communication Technologies. It is pervasive and is evolving rapidly across nations. This mobile revolution had opened up new avenues and opportunities, to design innovative solutions to support livelihood activities of people in developing countries. Agriculture in Sri Lanka is a sector which had not been fully exploited to identify the potential of developing innovative solutions to support farming activities. Timely and relevant agriculture information is essential for farmers to make effective decisions which would in turn empower them. Providing the right information at the right time required for farming activities is a major challenge as this information is available in different places in different formats. We developed a mobile agriculture information system and deployed among thirty farmers due to the high mobile penetration reported among farmers in Sri Lanka. The deployed artefact was field tested to ensure its suitability to support their daily decision making process. The sample group strongly endorsed mobile artefact and mentioned the potential of harnessing the agriculture knowledge.

Digital Knowledge Ecosystem to Reduce Uncertainty and Coordination Failure in Agricultural Markets - Study of “Govi Nena” Mobile-Based Information System

2)This paper presents how Digital Knowledge Ecosystem such as “Govi Nena” (translates as agriculture intelligence) can be used to provide a more effective and practical solution to eliminate the inefficiencies in agricultural markets and achieve higher productivity and price stability. In order to establish the framework to analyze the system, this paper uses a set of hypothetical scenarios faced by value chain actors based on a review of the literature, established knowledge and recent developing country experiences. The scenario analysis reveals that “Govi Nena” enables farmers to make effective production decisions, deepens the level of value chain integration, and enhances the level of welfare for the society as a whole.

Utilizing Superclass/Subclass Relationship in Mapping XML Schema to ORDBs

XML is popularly used as the de-facto standard for exchanging data between information systems. Storage and access to such XML encoded data is needed. Many approaches have been proposed: (i.) Storing XML data in its native form (native XML databases), (ii.)Use of existing DBMSs to store XML encoded data (XML-enabled databases). ORDBs integrate the rich object-oriented modeling capabilities as well as leverage the mature relational database technologies in storing and accessing data. Therefore, use of ORDBs to store XML encoded data enables us to exploit these rich powerful features. Extracting semantics that exists in XML schema enables us to exploit rich OO modeling capabilities of ORDBs during mapping. This is especially beneficial when storing large amounts of structured XML data. In this paper, we outline techniques to identify superclass/subclass relationship in XML Schema and propose guidelines to map XML Schema to ORDB schema utilizing such semantic information.