Lesson learned for ontology construction with Thai rice case study.
Aree Thunkijjanukij, Asanee Kawtrakul, Supamard Panichsakpatana, Uamporn Veesommai, T. Nagatsuka, S. Ninomiya · 2008
Ontology plays a critical role in knowledge creation and knowledge management process. It helps make knowledge acquisition and retrieval process significantly more intelligent. The Thai AGRIS Centre, the agriculture knowledge service center of Thailand, has constructed ontology prototype for plant production using rice production issue as a test case. Our results showed that retrieval output from ontology query method delivered Recall value 3 folds as high as the Recall value delivered by the conventional query method. It is therefore advisable that experts or information specialist in each specific knowledge domain should collaboratively start developing their respective ontology in order to help increase efficiency of knowledge acquisition and retrieval process of their respective knowledge community. There are some lessons learned that we would like to share and we hope that they can be tips for those who want to speed up their ontology development process. The guidelines are as followed: Firstly, try to identify the purpose and scope of your ontology unambiguously; secondly, find out existing principles and knowledge base available in that knowledge domain for conceptualizing concept and relation; thirdly, try not to reinvent the wheel by studying and reuse existing ontology; fourthly, defines and categorizes concepts and relations in a clear hierarchically order and define relationship between concept as specific as require; fifthly, make consistency for term representing concept; sixthly; develop guideline and criteria for each ontology construction; seventhly; create multi-lingual ontology to enable knowledge sharing worldwide; eighthly; use expert approach to build a new ontology and use semi-automatic approach to update it; and finally evaluation should be done from the intended users point of view.