Ontology Development: A Case Study for Thai Rice

This research reports on a pilot project that aimed to develop a prototype ontology for plant production using Thai rice as a case study. It is expected that the developed ontology will be used as a prototype model for other efforts to develop plant production ontology in the future. The Thai Rice Production Ontology provides an organizational framework of 2322 concepts and 5603 terms, in a system of hierarchical relations, together with 57 associative relations and 12 equivalence relations that allows reasoning about rice-production knowledge. The query expansion and reasoning components of the rice-production ontology can improve the performance of information retrieval and answer questions that a retrieval system without the ontology cannot. Terms in the ontology were used to query the Thai Rice Research Database (1350 records). The efficiency of the query was measured in terms of precision and recall. The experiment was conducted using five competency questions, and 93 queries were also defined. Retrieval experiments compared conventional search and ontological search approaches, supported with rice-production ontology-based query expansion. Results showed that the precision and recall rates increased on average from 0.08 to 0.72 and 0.01 to 0.64, respectively. The Thai Rice Production Ontology that has been developed will be a knowledge base for the management of knowledge on riceproduction research in Thailand.