Design Approaches Emerging in Developing an Agricultural Ontology for Sri Lankan Farmers

Building an ontology is not a simple task, because ontology development is a craft rather than an engineering activity. Ontology development depends on many factors, for examples, background of the domain experts, engineering techniques, need much time to investigate the domain in detail, and also it is a creative task. Then it is very easy to make mistakes due to lots of various new concepts for many users. Therefore ontology developers and researchers need best practices as well as ontology design patterns to construct good quality ontologies. However, the absence of structured guidelines, methods, and good practices hinders for the development of ontologies. We have developed a large user centered ontology to represent agricultural information and relevant knowledge in user context of Sri Lankan farmers. Through this development we have come across various design models and techniques. In this paper, we have highlighted those models and techniques that will be helpful for the users in the field of ontology development. This discussion is mainly based on three different scenarios. Scenario one mainly concerns for identifying the basic ontology components and their representations. Other scenarios such as event handling for complex real-world situations and conceptualization of overlapping concepts for the farmer location are discussed in detail and represented by using well-known Protégé tool.