Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department
University of Florida
hwb@ufl.edu
APAN 2003 - Japan
Serveral examples of designs for agricultural databases that incorporate ontologies will be presented. The examples include a database of agricultural extension publications, a content manager for agricultural educational materials, a database of dynamic simulations of irrigation, nutrient management, and other processes, and a database for agricultural decision support systems. The general architecture of all these applications is based on an object database that is enhanced with a description logic-based language for representing the semantics of concepts within the application domain. The formal language is also used to construct an ontology that provides a terminological basis for referring to concepts in the domain. Advantages of incorporating an ontology include better ways of representing concepts, ability to support natural language-based references to objects, graphic browsing based on data visualization of ontologies, and ontology assisted search.
Formal Languages for Ontologies