A Lifecycle-Based Design Methodology of the Lightweight Ontology and Its Application to Cultivating High Quality Mandarin Orange

Information technology is introduced to agriculture in order to improve all the cultivating process and the quality of the products. In this article, we propose a method to organize the cultivated knowledge with a focus on the life cycle process, based on the concept of lightweight ontology. We also propose a method for acquiring the knowledge easily by applying the technology of software engineering. We interviewed the farmers cultivating high quality mandarin orange and organized the ontology using the proposed method, and show the effectiveness of the proposed method.