Ontological Plant Representation for Dynamical Simulations

TL;DR

This paper explores how ontological approaches can improve plant modeling by analyzing existing ontologies, highlighting their potential and limitations for supporting botanical and agricultural applications.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for designing a bridged ontology to enhance plant conceptual modeling and support educational and precision agriculture tools.

Findings

Ontologies share many terms and relations but lack semantic annotations.

Ontologies support botanical descriptions at multiple scales.

Potential exists for ontologies to aid in learning and precision agriculture.

Abstract

The present study is aimed at analysing the benefits of an ontological approach in Functional Structural Plant Modelling. The ontological approach has been used at two levels, to refine the conceptual modelling approach, and to define the nomenclature of the plant. To the scope available domain-specific ontologies describing plant entities and their relations have been analysed to verify how they support botanical and phenological descriptions at different scales. The analysis put in evidence how ontologies have a large number of shared terms and also host a large number of structural and dynamical relations among entities, however, they still lack semantic annotation useful for a complete and consistent Conceptual Modelling, as put in evidence by Foundation Ontologies. Nonetheless, the analysis also put in evidence the potential of the approach and the basis for designing a bridged ontology to be used to produce tools for learning botany, growing techniques, and supporting precision Agriculture.