Anusha Indika

• B.Sc., M.Sc., PhD.
• Professor (Associate) at University of Ruhuna

People need contextualized information and knowledge to make better decisions. In case of farmers, the information that they require is available through agricultural websites, agriculture department leaflets and mass media. However, available information and knowledge are general, incomplete, heterogeneous, and unstructured. Since the farmers need...

With the continuous advancement of methods, tools, and techniques in ontology development, ontologies have emerged in various fields such as machine learning, robotics, biomedical informatics, agricultural informatics, crowdsourcing, database management, and the Internet of Things. Nevertheless, the nonexistence of a universally agreed methodology...

Despite the availability of a significant number of mobile applications, stakeholders in the agriculture domain have not been able to achieve their goals as expected due to the shortcomings of such information platforms available in Sri Lanka. Even though user satisfaction reflects the success of such apps, insufficient exploration regarding it tr...

Achieving quality in use (i.e., the higher-level quality objectives) is now widely accepted for building a usable system and software product. However, ontology engineering is a discipline for which the quality theories are not yet well developed and adapted and thus, ontology engineering still does not have an agreed methodology and standards for...

Ontology enables to represent domain knowledge in a formal way that can act as a component in an information system or as a part of an ontology network. In such environments, ontology quality is a key attribute that would influence the entire system or network quality. A diverse set of quality criteria and measures are available that support gettin...

The main purpose of the Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) is to produce foods by applying ecologically sustainable agricultural methods that are safe and wholesome to consumers. Therefore, farming with GAPs can eliminate vast environmental and health problems in modern industrial agriculture. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has beco...

This study intends to provide context-specific actionable information using the Packages of Practice (PoP) model through an ICT-based mobile platform regarding the key challenges faced by the potato farmers in Sri Lanka. A field survey was conducted in major potato growing districts in Sri Lanka. Primary data were collected using a pre-tested struc...

Introduction Agriculture plays an essential role in the developing countries and the backbone of the Sri Lankan financial system with a large number of small holdings and rural farmers (Chhachhar and Hassan, 2013; Potts, 2016). Farmers face many difficulties relating to low production, marketing, and agribusiness (Henegedara. G.M, 2015). In the dig...

Agriculture is the key source of livelihood and economic support for the Sri Lankan population. The farmer is the salient stakeholder in agriculture and he has to decide the appropriate crops for cultivation in every season. This decision should be primarily based on market conditions including pricing but several other factors such as climatic con...

Potato is one of the most attractive crops and plays an important role in human nutrition. However, average yield of the potato is less than its yield potential and local production is insufficient to meet the demand in Sri Lanka. Therefore, a field survey was conducted in major potato growing districts such as Badulla, Nuwara-Eliya and Jaffna to e...

A "Ruhuna Govi-Nena" project is the real-time information system to achieve food security in Sri Lanka and to provide stable and sustainable prices for farmers and consumers. There are main areas covered by this project, such as crop information and knowledge, farmers' details (registered users), agricultural activities based on different agro-ecol...

The majority of farmers make decisions based on a combination of approximate measurements, experience, and recommendations of fellow farmers. This leads to inaccurate predictions and unanticipated outcomes. Hence, developing demand and supply prediction models and the delivery of model outputs between multiple stakeholder levels would be more effec...

Sri Lanka is an agricultural country and 28.4% of the total labor force of the country is engaged with agricultural activities. Technology has impacted on day-today activities and the usage of smart phones has made people's lives easier than before with the innovative technologies. Famers, Agriculture Instructors (AIs) and others in agriculture sec...

Cinnamon (Cinnamomum zeylanicum Blume) is indigenous to Sri Lanka which holds a virtual monopoly of cinnamon in the world accounting for around 90% of the global trade. Because of its industrial applications and medicinal properties, there is a growing demand for true cinnamon in the world. Major drawbacks of the cinnamon industry in Sri Lanka are...

Sri Lanka accounts for over 80% of the global trade of true cinnamon. In view of its industrial applications and medicinal properties, there is growing demand for true cinnamon in the world. However, the average yield of cinnamon (Cinnamomum zeylanicum Blume) in Sri Lanka is only around 250-300 kgha-1year-1 as against a potential yield of more than...

Paddy cultivation depends on fertilizers to obtain high yield. Thus, the demand for fertilizers has been increased. It is required to choose suitable fertilizers in correct quantities to get maximum yield while minimizing harmful effects. Sri Lankan farmers face difficulties when selecting proper fertilizers and quantities based on environmental co...

Still a large percentage of the world population, especially in developing countries are depending on agriculture for their livelihood. The agriculture domain in many developing countries is not well coordinated leading to over and under production of crops resulting in widely fluctuating market prices, waste and economic hardship for farmers. Rapi...

If we can represent the knowledge as a fully machine interpreted way, it offers many advantages to solving various kinds of problems in knowledge engineering. Most of the knowledge can be found scattered with in a domain of interest as websites, televisions, radios, publications, etc. This knowledge needs to be extracted and to be represented, so t...

Ontologies are getting popular for knowledge representation because it is capable of representing the semantics of the knowledge. However, with the evolution of the knowledge, maintaining and support evolution of a developed ontology becomes a complex task. We can get help of domain experts to maintain the ontology as a solution. But, that approach...

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...

The study analyses an enhancement technique in a farming life cycle to address the identified issues in the agriculture sector in Sri Lanka. The issue in agriculture sectors to be addressed to sustain a robust economic growth of a country. The government of Sri Lanka identified that providing solutions to agricultural issues is an important aspect...

As a result of recent enhancements in global knowledge sharing capabilities, knowledge representation and reasoning with ontologies for acquisition of implicit learning is gaining more attention among general communities. Agriculture being a dynamic economic sector in the Sri Lankan context, can massively benefit from such a knowledge repository th...

The quality of an ontology very much depends on its validity. Therefore, ontology validation and evaluation is very important task. However, according to the current literature, there is no agreed method or approach to evaluate an ontology. The choice of a suitable approach very much depends on the purpose of validation or evaluation, the applicati...

This paper presents how Digital Knowledge Ecosystem such as “Govi Nena” (translates as agriculture intelligence) can be used to provide a more effective and practical solution to eliminate the inefficiencies in agricultural markets and achieve higher productivity and price stability. In order to establish the framework to analyze the system, this p...

The Agriculture sector plays a vital role in Sri Lanka's economy. Not having an agricultural knowledge repository that can be easily accessed by people in agriculture community in Sri Lanka within their own context, is a major problem. As a solution, a large user centred ontology for Sri Lankan farmers was developed to provide required information/...

An Ontology once developed needs to be kept up-to-date preferably as a collaborative process which will require web based tools. We have developed a large user centered ontology for Sri Lankan agriculture domain to represent agricultural information and relevant knowledge that can be queried in user context. We have generalized our design approach....

People working in the agriculture domain in Sri Lanka are affected by not being able to get vital information required to support their domain related activities in a timely manner. Some of the required information can be found in government websites, agriculture department leaflets, newspapers, etc. The required information is hard to find from th...

We have developed and successfully trialled a Social Life Network (SLN); a Mobile Based Information System to support farming activities in Sri Lanka. It provides information required to support activities such as crop selection and cultivation planning in the context of farmer, farm location, season and task being performed. The system also provid...

Farmers in Sri Lanka are badly affected by not being able to get vital information required to support their farming activities in a timely manner. Some of the required information can be found in government websites, agriculture department leaflets, and through radio and television programs on agriculture. This knowledge is not reaching the farmer...

People need contextualized information and knowledge to make better decisions. In case of farmers, the information that they require is available through agricultural websites, agriculture department leaflets and mass media. However, available information and knowledge are general, incomplete, heterogeneous, and unstructured. Since the farmers need...

Farmers in Sri Lanka are badly affected by not being able to get vital information required to support their farming activities in a timely manner. Some of the required information can be found in government websites, agriculture department leaflets, and through radio and television programs on agriculture. Due to its unstructured and varied format...

Farmers in Sri Lanka are badly affected by not being able to get vital information required to support their farming activities in a timely manner. Some of the required information can be found in government websites, agriculture department leaflets, and through radio and television programs on agriculture. Due to its unstructured and varied format...