An Ontology-based Supporting System for Integrated Farming towards a Concept of the Sufficiency Economy

Abstract

Sufficiency Economy has been a guideline in several aspects in Thai culture and has been applied to agriculture theory called The New Agriculture Theory. Its core concept is to maintain self-reliant and sustainable resources within one’s own farmland by integrating farming parts. To promote the theory, we propose the first framework to support farmers who are interesting in exploiting the theory by providing a suggestion on how to be self-reliant and sustainable farm. Ontologies are designed to capture domain knowledge of the theory along with inference rules for making a logical suggestion of farming process. An inference engine is utilized to suggest a logical setting plan according to environment and need of individual farmer. Not only a self-reliant and sustainable procedure in farm setting is suggested, but the framework also provides an optimizing selection for each agriculture part. By testing, we found that the recommendations are accurate for 94.75% when they are compared with experts’ opinion.