A Software Application with Ontology-Based Reasoning for Agroforestry
Résumé
Agroforestry consists of combining trees with agriculture, both on farms and in the agricultural landscape. Within a context of sustainable development, agroforestry can improve soil conservation and reduce the use of toxic chemicals on crops, as well as improving biodiversity. Interdisciplinary by nature, the field of agroforestry mobilizes a large body of knowledge from environmental and life sciences using systemic approaches. In this framework, field observation data are acquired in partnership with several categories of stakeholders such as scientists, foresters, farmers, breeders, politicians and land managers. For data management effciency, we propose the software application AOBRA (a software
Application with Ontology-Based Reasoning for Agroforestry). The core of AOBRA is a domain ontology called "Agroforestry" which serves as a basis for capitalizing and sharing knowledge in agroforestry. By exploiting the capabilities of inference and linkages to other areas of expertise on the Web offered by the use of an ontology model, it aims to provide a broad view of agroforestry designs, and to allow the comparison between different spatial layouts of trees and crops