A Framework for Evaluating Agricultural Ontologies

TL;DR

This paper introduces a structured framework for evaluating agricultural ontologies, addressing the lack of explicit evaluation procedures and enhancing their reliability and sharing in semantic applications.

Contribution

It presents a novel evaluation framework tailored for agricultural ontologies, guiding the selection of appropriate assessment methods based on ontology purpose.

Findings

Provides a systematic evaluation framework for agricultural ontologies.

Supports matching evaluation methods to ontology purposes.

Aims to improve ontology reliability and sharing in semantic systems.

Abstract

An ontology is a formal representation of domain knowledge, which can be interpreted by machines. In recent years, ontologies have become a major tool for domain knowledge representation and a core component of many knowledge management systems, decision support systems and other intelligent systems, inter alia, in the context of agriculture. A review of the existing literature on agricultural ontologies, however, reveals that most of the studies, which propose agricultural ontologies, are lacking an explicit evaluation procedure. This is undesired because without well-structured evaluation processes, it is difficult to consider the value of ontologies to research and practice. Moreover, it is difficult to rely on such ontologies and share them on the Semantic Web or between semantic aware applications. With the growing number of ontology-based agricultural systems and the increasing popularity of the Semantic Web, it becomes essential that such development and evaluation methods are put forward to guide future efforts of ontology development. Our work contributes to the literature on agricultural ontologies, by presenting a method for evaluating agricultural ontologies, which seems to be missing from most existing studies on agricultural ontologies. The framework supports the matching of appropriate evaluation methods for a given ontology based on the ontology's purpose.