Developing a Semantic Irrigation Ontology to Support WaterSmart System:
A Demonstration of Reducing Water and Energy Consumption in Nebraska
Abstract
Traditional crop irrigation relies on farmers’ knowledge on plant, soil,
and weather. Irrigation system is one of the key facilities in Nebraska
to supply sufficient water resource to farming activities. However, in
large scale farming, it is not rare to see plant get over irrigated
while the marginal economic benefit of irrigation decreases
significantly. The WaterSmart system combines various data sources to
provide irrigation guidance to help farmers making better irrigation
decision. To support the WaterSmart system, a semantic irrigation
ontology is developed to understand these Agro-Geoinformatics data with
local planting knowledge such as water usage during different crop
stages. Local knowledge on crop irrigation has already been studied and
published by Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Nebraska
Extension at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The ontology is built
using Webprotégé with using HermiT as the reasoner. The ontology focuses
on two main crops in Nebraska: corn and soybean. Final product is
released on GitHub repository and registered with w3id thru persistent
uniform resource locator (PURL). All software and tools were used to
develop the ontology are open source. The ontology is used to represent
irrigation knowledge and host concepts in the irrigation decision making
portal.