iAgri – an agricultural value chain management system

Abstract

Agricultural sector bears an utmost significance due to the food crisis that the present world is facing. Though there is a food crisis, the agricultural resources are wasted due to the unbalanced nature of the demand and supply followed by the inefficiencies in agricultural value chain. To properly manage the whole process, there is a need for expertise knowledge and a proper communication channel between stakeholders. This system is an effort to solve the problem of deriving information from scattered and distributed sources and to provide a common space for sharing the information. As the solution, an Agricultural Value Chain Management system has been implemented. The system divides agricultural value chain in to 6 stages called Deciding, Seeding, Preparing and Planting, Growing, Harvesting and Selling. The agent based system will centralize the disseminated agricultural information to a central ontology, so that the user can derive necessary information as they want, anytime they want. The necessary information needs are identified at the each stage by the system and the information is derived from the various agricultural information sources. Then the most suitable information is provided according to the crop and the value chain stage of the crop.