Building Knowledge Graphs Towards a Global Food Systems Datahub

TL;DR

This paper presents the development of ontologies and knowledge graphs to encode sustainable wheat production practices, aiming to standardize data for better analysis and AI applications in global food systems.

Contribution

It introduces a structured, logic-based approach to modeling sustainable wheat production knowledge through ontologies and knowledge graphs, filling a gap in current data representation methods.

Findings

Preliminary schemas of the knowledge graph are developed.

Ontology modeling follows a modular structure with expert input.

Data sources include public datasets, experiments, and stakeholder workshops.

Abstract

Sustainable agricultural production aligns with several sustainability goals established by the United Nations (UN). However, there is a lack of studies that comprehensively examine sustainable agricultural practices across various products and production methods. Such research could provide valuable insights into the diverse factors influencing the sustainability of specific crops and produce while also identifying practices and conditions that are universally applicable to all forms of agricultural production. While this research might help us better understand sustainability, the community would still need a consistent set of vocabularies. These consistent vocabularies, which represent the underlying datasets, can then be stored in a global food systems datahub. The standardized vocabularies might help encode important information for further statistical analyses and AI/ML approaches in the datasets, resulting in the research targeting sustainable agricultural production. A structured method of representing information in sustainability, especially for wheat production, is currently unavailable. In an attempt to address this gap, we are building a set of ontologies and Knowledge Graphs (KGs) that encode knowledge associated with sustainable wheat production using formal logic. The data for this set of knowledge graphs are collected from public data sources, experimental results collected at our experiments at Kansas State University, and a Sustainability Workshop that we organized earlier in the year, which helped us collect input from different stakeholders throughout the value chain of wheat. The modeling of the ontology (i.e., the schema) for the Knowledge Graph has been in progress with the help of our domain experts, following a modular structure using KNARM methodology. In this paper, we will present our preliminary results and schemas of our Knowledge Graph and ontologies.