Ontology Engineering and Knowledge Services for Agriculture Domain

This paper presents a knowledge service system for the domain of agriculture. Three key issues for providing knowledge services are how to improve the access of unstructured and scattered information for the non-specialist users, how to provide adequate information to knowledge workers and how to provide the information requiring highly focused and related information. Cyber-Brain has been designed as a platform that combines approaches based on knowledge engineering and language engineering to gather knowledge from various sources and to provide the effective knowledge service. Based on specially designed ontology for practical service scenarios, it can aggregate knowledge from Internet, digital archives, expert, and other resources for providing one-stop-shop knowledge services. The domain specific and task oriented ontology also enables advanced search and allows the system ensures that knowledge service could improve the user benefit. Users are presented with the necessary information closely related to their information need and thus of potential high interest. This paper presents several service scenarios for different end-users and reviews ontology engineering and its life cycle for supporting AOS （Agricultural Ontology Services） Vocbench which is the heart of knowledge services in agriculture domain.

User Interface Development Based on Ontologies

The user interface is a central component of any mo de rn application program. It determines how well end users accept, learn, and effi ciently work with the application program. The user interface is very difficult to design, to implement, to modify. It takes approximately 70% of the time requ ired for designing an application program. All the existing tools for user interface design can be divided into two basic c ategories-Interface Builders and Model-based Interface development tools, whic h trace their roots from user interface management systems. Interface Builders a re the most widespread and excellent to create layouts and manipulate widgets. H owever, Interface Builders have the follow demerits. An interface designed using Interface Builders can contain hundreds of procedures. Interface Builders give us no possibility to develop different pieces of the same interface separately. They do not help us in managing user tasks and can be used only by programmers. Model-based interface development tools have attracted a high degree of interes t in last few years. The basic premise of model based technology is that the interface development can be fully supported by declarative models of all user interface characteristics such as their presen tation, dialogue, domain of application etc, and then the user interface develop ment can be centered around such models. The high potential of this technology has not been realized yet. This fact has the following reasons. The known interface models are partial representations of interfaces. They cannot be readily modified by developers, and are not publicly available to the HCI community. The central ingredient for success in model-ba sed systems is a declarative, complete, versatile interface model that can expre ss a wide variety of interface designs. Therefore tool developers have to avoid the following disadvantages of current interface models: inflexibility, system- dependence, and incompleteness. The main idea to achieve these model character istics mention above is to use ontologies. This broadened interest in ontologies is based on the fact that they provide ma chine-understandable representation of semantics for information, and a shared and common understanding of a domain that can be communicated between people and across application systems. Support in data, information, and knowledge exchang e becomes the key issue in current computer technology. At the moment we are on the brink of the second Web generation called Semantic Web or Knowledgeable Web. Given the increasing amount of information available on-line, this kind of sup port is becoming more important day by day. The main idea of the proposed approach is to replace interface models by appropr iate ontologies. Some parts of these ontologies will be available from the Inter net; the other parts will be built by developers. As a result of the Semantic We b development we will have increasing the number of ontologies formally describe d in the Internet. The terminology and content of these ontologies will be inter nationally standardized. Reusing these ontologies will bring down the cost of de velopment and improve the quality of user interface. The parts of a user interface model are-a domain ontology model, a dialog ontol ogy model, presentation ontology model, "business- logic" variable ontology mod el and correspondences between these parts. Thus, the user interface development based on ontologies is an evolution of th e model-based approach, where appropriate ontologies are used instead of models .

A formal model for plastic human computer interfaces

The considerable and significant progress achieved in the design and development of new interaction devices between man and machine has enabled the emergence of various powerful and efficient input and/or output devices. Each of these new devices brings specific interaction modes. With the emergence of these devices, new interaction techniques and modes arise and new interaction capabilities are offered. New user interfaces need to be designed or former ones need to evolve. The design of so called plastic user interfaces contributes to handling such evolutions. The key requirement for the design of such a user interface is that the new obtained user interface shall be adapted to the application and have, at least, the same behavior as the previous （adapted） one. This paper proposes to address the problem of user interface evolution due to the introduction of new interaction devices and/or new interaction modes. More, precisely, we are interested by the study of the design process of a user interface resulting from the evolution of a former user interface due to the introduction of new devices and/or new interaction capabilities. We consider that interface behaviors are described by labelled transition systems and comparison between user interfaces is handled by an extended definition of the bi-simulation relationship to compare user interface behaviors when interaction modes are replaced by new ones.