Ontology-based data acquisition model development for agricultural open data platforms and implementation of OWL2MVC tool

Abstract

In the open data world, it is difficult to collect data in compliance with a certain data model that is of interest to different types of stakeholders within a domain like agriculture. Ontologies that provide broad vocabularies and metadata with respect to a given domain can be used to create various data models. We consider that while creating data acquisition forms to gather data related to an agricultural product, which is hazelnut in this study, from stakeholders of the relevant domain, the traits can be modeled as attributes of the data models. We propose a generic ontology-based data acquisition model to create data acquisition forms based on model-view-controller (MVC) design pattern, to publish and make use of on the agricultural open data platforms. We develop a tool called OWL2MVC that integrates the Hazelnut Ontology, which illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed model for generating data acquisition forms. Because model creation is implemented in compliance with the selection of ontology classes, stakeholders; in other words, the users of OWL2MVC Tool could generate data acquisition forms quickly and independently. OWL2MVC Tool was evaluated in terms of usability by fifty-three respondents implementing the case-study scenario. Among others the findings show that the tool has satisfactory usability score overall and is promising to provide stakeholders with required support for agricultural open data platforms.