Performance Analysis on Agriculture Ontology
Using SPARQL Query System
Aditya Khamparia
Babita Pandey
Department of Computer Department of Computer
Science and Engineering,
Application,
Lovely ProfessionalUniversity,
Lovely Professional University
Phagwara, Punjab, India Phagwara, Punjab, India
khamparia.aditya@gmail.com
shukla_babita@yahoo.co.in
Abstract—Ontologies are used to represent domain knowledge
with help of object, their behaviour and properties. This paper
represents web enabled approach on agriculture semantic web
using SPARQL and specified tools to increase productivity of
farmers. This work focuses on assessment of query optimization
tools and results predicted from them to determine the suitability
of each method for different users where structured ontologies
are used as querying aids for agriculture based dataset.
Keywords— Semantic web, SPARQL, Ontograf, DL-Query,
TLX, Reasoner, RDF
I. INTRODUCTION
Semantic web also known as intelligent web
offers users to work on shared meaningful
knowledge representation on web. It creates an
artificial intelligence application which established
relations among individuals and classes of objects
to represent an area of domain knowledge with help
of ontology. Ontology is formal explicit
specification of shared conceptualization.
Conceptualization refers to an abstract model of
some phenomenon in world by having identified
Knowledge base in detail with individual
relationships [1]. We present an application
problem about searching the appropriate semantic
information and resources in agriculture as a
domain ontology with help of class and relation
among instances or objects which gives information
to farmer about their crop marketing, quality of
seeds and diseases. Although semantic web is not
fully developed and standardized, but we give
proposal on ontology structure for the relevant
concepts of that phenomenon. Explicit, means that
type of concept used, and constraint on their use are
explicitly defined. Formal refers to fact that
ontology should be machine readable. Shared
reflect the notion that ontology represents
consensual knowledge that refers to some group not
978-1-4799-4674-7/14/$31.00©2014 IEEE
Vikas Pardesi
Department of Computer
Science and Engineering
Lovely Professional University
Phagwara, Punjab, India
vikaspardesi@hotmail.com
individual. In ontology concepts of domain are
represented by classes. Features and attribute of
concept are described by object and data properties.
Instances are created for individual subclasses to
represent or describe agriculture and various tools
which will made query for semantic information in
easy way at application structure with help of
SPARQL [8]. Main purpose of paper is to impart
information retrieval, and analyse the performance
of web enabled applications for domain users to
predict their query evaluated performance. The
remaining part of this paper is organized as follows:
Section 2 detailed framework of domain ontology
and development tool. Section 3 describes possible
approach of ontology construction for agriculture
based system. Section 4 detailed evaluation and
query analysis on onto logical tools to determine
their effectiveness for end user support. Section 5
concluded with future work.
II ONTOLOGY FRAMEWORK AND DEVELOPMENT
TOOLS
A. Architecture of Agriculture Ontology
In this section we introduced architecture of
agriculture ontology which enabled by SPARQL on
desktop based application. Protégé tool used for
ontology development which acts as an interface
between knowledge and domain ontology with help
of API. After development of ontology it leads to
various different applications on which with help of
visualization and retrieval tools like SPARQL, DL-
Query, and Ontograf information can be extracted
easily on editor. Reasoning must be carried out with
help of pellet reasoner to yield inference and
conclusions. Knowledge base acts as a repository
for domain information.

Fig. 1 Architecture of Agriculture Ontology
B. Study on Ontology Development Tools
There are varieties of ontological tools available for
creation, modification and retrieving linked data.
These tools helps to demonstrate agriculture based
ontology system where farmer gets latest details
about crop prices in market, seeds quality and
diseases from which crop get affected. All such
relevant information can be extracted out easily
with help of query retrieval system like SPARQL,
DL-Query and Ontograf helps in visualization of
quality among them.
(i) Protégé (2000) - Protégé 2000 [2] tool created
by Stanford University, its main aim was to
simplify the knowledge acquisition process for
expert systems. It is oriented to task of ontology
and knowledge base development. Protégé is most
suitable as it provides better flexibility for meta-
modeling and enables construction of domain
ontologies without any syntactic information.
(ii) Jena – It is java based tool for building
semantic web applications. It is used to store, create
and manipulate RDF and OWL data. RDF data
stored in triple format and also provides oracle Jena
adaptor with java interface API for creating and
accessing RDF data and ontology.
(iii) SPARQL – Query automated tool based on
SPARQL are similar to SQL queries structurally
but very semantically and performance of SPARQL
is quite high compared to SQL. SPARQL [8] is
used to retrieve data from RDF dataset relevant to
user query.
(iv) Onto Graf (2010) – Most of ontology web
language developed in protégé editor. OWL
ontologies and their relationship can be easily
navigated with help of onto graf. This tool
incorporates several addition features to export
visible RDF [5] graph into dot language file format.
(v) DL-Query (2008) - Class definition can be
tested easily by assuming membership of arbitrary
descriptions without creating details of named class.
This tool provide addition features to OWL
application [4] by providing support for data and
object properties, Query Box, equivalent class,
subclass and Query result frame.
III AGRICULTURE ONTOLOGY (AGRO)
The protégé ontology editor tool was used to create
AGRO ontology. Protégé helped in modeling of
ontology of classes to describe a particular subject,
for entering specific instances and knowledge base
details and for execution of applications. Classes
describe concepts in domain which are shown in
Figure 2 as crop, soil, pest, diseases, Activities etc.
Instances can be defined to object of class to exhibit
its properties like Angular_leaf_spot, cotton,
Bacterial_blight etc. Relation between two class is
defined by object properties as shown in Figure 3
where every object property has some domain class
and range class for example affected_by (Crop,
Diseases), Harmed_by (Crop, Pest) etc. Data
property of any class is a property which gives
values for instances of that class. It’s a relation
between class and data type value. Eg. Cure
(Disease, string).
Fig. 2 AGRO Ontology

Fig. 3 Object Properties
degree of skills both in agricultural skills and crop
marketing. Taxonomy of agricultural ontology was
shown in Figure 2 where it comprises of classes,
objects and instances. This experiment constructed
different queries to retrieve information from
agriculture ontology. Queries are grouped into
different types according to number of classes they
entail, whether they are relevant to ontology
hierarchy or not and number of classes having
common instance or characteristics etc. Different
query types are presented with brief description
examples.
1. User (Farmer) is given value of slot of an
instance and asked to find value of another slot of
same instance. For example “How many bacterial
diseases affects crop of variety “G12286?”
To solve this case each farmer has to identify a
particular method or objects and select a user
defined value for information retrieval.

Fig. 5 Execution of Query 1

Fig. 4 Onto Graf of AGRO Ontology
2. Farmer provides some specific objects values and
IV PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS asked to retrieve value for older distinguished
Our project deals with agriculture based ontology toobjects. For example “What is the type of soil in
inform farmers regarding crop details, diseases and which crop variety G12286 has grown?”
quality of seeds. An experiment was conducted to Here continuous succession between objects relates
evaluate methods and procedures employed by them with each other to select values for answering
farmers while researching for information based on queries.
agriculture domain. Ontologies are used as
knowledge builder for their efficient management
and information retrieval on basis of distinguished
applications. For assessment of ontology behaviour,
a farmer group with both having agricultural skills
and awareness regarding crops, seeds was selected.
Specific domain ontology being constructed on
basis of feedback obtained from skilled farmer in
field of marketing and agriculture. Most of farmers Fig. 6 Execution of Query 2
were from rural region. All farmers aware regarding
cultivated field behaviour as they predict fertility 3. Here user knows superclass behaviour and asked
using various testing techniques but they vary in to identify behaviour of subclass which is linked to
it. For example “What are the symptoms of Cotton
[10] crop which is affected by viral diseases or
pest?”
Individual superclass identified as main symptom
which shows relationship in hierarchical way with
subclasses like leaf seeds colour changes, black
spots identified on petal etc.
agriculture tools performs better than average and
scored lower TLX and response time. It was
observed from different figures that SPARQL has
lower TLX in maximum queries performance in
comparison to other tools like Onto Graf and DL-
Query. On basis of comparison achieved from Fig.
9 it depicts that SPARQL is far better suited in
agriculture based ontology for assessment and
retrieval of efficient information that was possible
with these knowledge builder tools [11].

Fig. 7 Execution of Query 3

4. Query for how many number of objects of

specific class being identified. For example “How
many number of activities performed by farmer?”
Result of query is number user has to identify
predictable objects and calculate them if specific
feature obtained.

Fig. 8 Execution of Query 4

5. Specific value being obtained for identifying

different objects. For example, “what are the
numbers of cotton crops affected by fungal
disease?”
Query shows counting and user has to locate
specific objects on basis of their count. Different
users intend to identify their soil fertility and
growth on basis of results retrieved by using
SPARQL, DL-Query and Onto Graf.
NASA Task load Index (TLX) [3] has been used
for query analysis and time needed to perform
query execution. Fig. 9 illustrated comparative
result of different queries on basis of result
achieved by farmer to yield best performance. On
basis of experimental results, it was observed that
farmers who have provided hands on experience of Fig. 9 TLX and Time Comparison for different
queries using SPARQL, DL-Query, Ontograf.
 V CONCLUSION
This paper presents application for creation of
Agriculture domain ontology (AGRO) and querying
the relations using SPARQL end point. It also
reported out performance analysis and comparative
evaluation of queries based on ontological tools.
The results are being analyzed in order to extract
interesting patterns. It also deals with evaluation of
ontology and test methods employed by users for
dealing with various information retrieval types.
Now semantic web have very less technologies
term in agriculture research, this work will be used
in intelligent agro system for companies and
research bodies in future. It motivates crop
ontology applications for beneficial of farmers. This
work can be extended with big data management
and deploy information for large scalable data.
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