Citrus ontology development based on the eight-point charter of agriculture

Developing large-scale agricultural ontologies is a challenging and error-prone task that requires substantial effort and collaboration between domain experts and ontology developers due to the complexity of agricultural knowledge. Inspired by the Chinese Eight-Point Charter of Agriculture, i.e., Soil, Fertilization, Water, Variety, Density, Protection, Management and Tool, this paper presents an approach to modeling and integrating citrus production knowledge. Citrus domain knowledge is classified into eight categories based on the Eight-Point Charter of Agriculture, and the relationships in each category and among categories are established. The eight categories and the relationships are defined as the citrus production knowledge framework. Then, we propose mechanisms to develop citrus ontology based on the citrus production knowledge framework. The Fertilization ontology is created as an illustration of our approach, which contains 866 ontology entities and 12,583 Resource Description Framework triples. The structural evaluation results of the eight metrics for the Fertilization ontology are considerably better than the average and median values of 1413 Web ontologies. In addition, four anti patterns were used to evaluate the ontology, and no occurrence of the antipatterns was detected for the 866 ontology entities. The accuracy of the ontology is ensured by the competency evaluation of the 110 questions with 88% accuracy. Our approach provides an effective solution for modeling complex agricultural knowledge and transforming the agriculture domain knowledge into computable resources.