C3PO: a crop planning and production process ontology and knowledge graph

Area of Science:

• Agricultural Science
• Computer Science
• Knowledge Representation

Background:

• Crop diversification and rotation enhance farm income, yields, and sustainability.
• Farmers require effective planning tools for yearly and multi-year agricultural work.
• Existing planning methods rely heavily on farmer experience.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a Crop Planning and Production Process Ontology (C3PO) for diversified vegetable production.
• To assist farmers in planning decisions and monitoring agricultural practices.
• To create a knowledge graph integrating agricultural data and semantic resources.

Main Methods:

• Developed C3PO with eight modules to capture crop production complexity.
• Encoded agricultural processes, farm plot organization, and common knowledge.
• Created a knowledge graph aggregating data from semantic resources like taxonomies and chemical databases.

Main Results:

• C3PO represents technical itineraries for vegetable production, from soil to storage.
• The C3PO knowledge graph integrates diverse agricultural data.
• Publicly available C3PO and its knowledge graph support decision support systems.

Conclusions:

• C3PO provides a robust framework for representing and managing knowledge in diversified crop production.
• The developed knowledge graph enhances data integration for agricultural decision support.
• The ontology and knowledge graph are valuable resources for developing advanced farming tools.