C3PO: a crop planning and production process ontology and knowledge graph

Abstract

Vegetable crop farmers diversify their production by growing a range of crops during the season on the same plot. Crop diversification and rotation enables farmers to increase their income and crop yields while enhancing their farm sustainability against climatic events and pest attacks. Farmers must plan their agricultural work per year and over successive years. Planning decisions are made on the basis of their experience regarding previous plans. For the purpose of assisting farmers in planning decisions and monitoring, we developed the Crop Planning and Production Process Ontology (C3PO), i.e., a representation of agricultural knowledge and data for diversified crop production. C3PO is composed of eight modules to capture all crop production dimensions and complexity for representing farming practices and constraints. It encodes agricultural processes and farm plot organization and captures common agricultural knowledge. C3PO introduces a representation of technical itineraries, i.e., sequences of technical farming tasks to grow vegetables, from soil identification and seed selection to harvest and storage. C3PO is the backbone of a knowledge graph which aggregates data from heterogeneous related semantic resources, e.g., organism taxonomies, chemicals, reference crop listings, or development stages. C3PO and its knowledge graph are used by the Elzeard enterprise to develop knowledge-based decision support systems for farmers. This article describes how we built C3PO and its knowledge graph—which are both publicly available—and briefly outlines their applications.