Designing of Ontology for Domain Vocabulary on Agriculture Activity Ontology (AAO) and a Lesson Learned

This paper proposes Agriculture Activity Ontology (AAO) as a basis of the core vocabulary of agricultural activity. Since concepts of agriculture activities are formed by the various context such as purpose, means, crop, and field, we organize the agriculture activity ontology as a hierarchy of concepts discriminated by various properties such as purpose, means, crop and field. The vocabulary of agricultural activity is then defined as the subset of the ontology. Since the ontology is consistent, extendable, and capable of some inferences thanks to Description Logics, so the vocabulary inherits these features. The vocabulary is also linked to existing vocabularies such as AGROVOC. It is expected to use in the data format in the agricultural IT system. The vocabulary is adopted as the part of “the guideline for agriculture activity names for agriculture IT systems” issued by Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF), Japan. Also we investigated the usefulness of the ontology as the method for defining the domain vocabulary.