Preliminary Study on Advisory System

Framework in Agricultural Environment.

Presenter:
Junaidah Mohamed Kassim
 Content
• Introduction
• Problem Statement
• Objective
• Literature Review
• Research Methodology
 Introduction
• The information Society is in general opinion about
to force fundamental changes in business and private
life.
• In a way to achieve the level of information society,
lots of changes must be done in our life.
• Agriculture plays significant roles in the country’s
economic development like Malaysia functioning as
food supplier, employment provider, export earner
and provider of raw materials for the agro-based
industries.
• Based on land use statistics, approximately 313 600
hectare (ha) of peat in Peninsular Malaysia have been
developed for agriculture, representing 32% of the
total peat area.
• Out of this, about 280 500 ha (comprising 28% of the
total peat area in the peninsular) are found in the west
coast states [2].
• Thus, in helping young farmers to pick the most
suitable type of plants, the Department of Agriculture
has provided a customer service centre to the farmers.
• The current trend practice to all farmers in Malaysia
now is the way like one way process.
• Expansion and advisory services in agriculture sector
are required to assist farmers to achieve commercial
status projects. The advice will be given by ‘Dr Pokok’
officer from Farmer Association Malaysia (LPP).
• The service is run by Farmers' Association and can be
considered as an effort to transfer suitable current
technology in agriculture or rearing livestock to the
farmers.
• The purpose of this service are to increasing
the farmers' competitiveness by reducing
production cost and also increasing the
farmers' knowledge in order to increase farm’s
production [3]. But most of the farmers are
not able to cope with the purpose because of
lack of information in decision making.
 Problem Statement
• Irrelevance of the delivered information in
decision making
• Inability of the system to cover all farmers
• Lack of resources (advices) to improve
performance
• Unaccountability regarding advice given by the
system
• Based on our problem background we derived
our research question. Our questions are as
follows:
– What attributes involved in decision making
process in crops cultivation management?
– How to sure that all farmers get the right
information at the right time?
– How collective knowledge are acquired, stored,
disseminate and transfer in agricultural domain?
• The aim of this research is to develop an ontology-based
advisory system for farmers to increase profitability by
reducing time in decision making and reducing the cost of
production.
• This study also determines the difficulty of decision
making of farmers.
• This can be achieve by providing timely advice to the
farmers in the following areas: pest warning and control,
fertilizer use in terms of amount and timing, choice of
crops to be based on soil test and other information to
help farmers to do decision making.
• The Objectives are as follows:
– To collect and visualize the formalized agricultural
knowledge that is used for practical advice in
Rambutan cultivation.
– To provide proactive crop advisory service in
deciding Rambutan cultivating to the farmers.
– To formulate and design an advisory system
framework to help farmers in decision making
– To develop a prototype and evaluate the framework.
 Research significance
• With this system, it is possible to provide latest
expert advice in a timely manner to the farmer and
thereby reduce the effect of the factors that disturb
the crop.
• We also can reduce the workload for Agriculture
Experts (EA) to commute from one farm to another
farm to monitor the crop.
• The status of the crop can be view from this system
and at the same its provide advanced agricultural
advice to the farming community.
 Literature Review
Attribute/ E-Sagu (2007) PSS (2008) Pl@nteInfo (2000)
features
Focus  Personalized Expert  Advice to potential plant  Advice to farmers
advice to farmers  Tomato, pineapple,  Crop management
 All plant banana, mandarin
orange, papaya
User Farmers Farmers Farmers
Organization Crops adviser
Expert
Expert Advice Yes No No
Personalization Yes but not all module Yes but very broad Yes
Knowledge based Combination of Yes but not maintain by Combination of two
Agricultural Data agricultural expert server
Warehouse and agricultural  Data are from MARDI,  DIAS
expert. DOA and FAMA.  DAAC
Problem Solving Yes -support decision Yes -support decision making Yes - support decision
making making
Ontology or No No No
vocabulary
Result Yes with suggestion Yes with suggestion Yes with suggestion
Decision Case based reasoning Rules based Cased based reasoning
technique Rules based Rules based
Current scenario for farmer in Malaysia
Propose Framework : e-Peladang Agricultural information dissemination
system. Double arrow indicates information flow.
 Techniques that can be used in your
research
• We are using two techniques in the proposed system.
• Personalization .
– This technique can help the farmers to personalize their problem to the
system. It is important to personalized in detail the situation or
scenario facing by the farmers. For example, if the farmers is facing
with the pesticide problem. They can capture a picture and send it to
system by describing the feature or problem to the system through
personalization.
• Knowledge management
– The system has a repository of knowledge regarding Rambutan
cultivation. The data or knowledge consist of crop photograph, crop
observation, farm history and other data such as soil, weather,
pesticide, farmer registration, and so on.
 data sets availability
• We can have the data regarding the
Rambutan’s farmers and the cultivation from
(Malaysia Agriculture Research and
Development Institue (MARDI), Farmers
Organization of Malaysia (LPP) and also from
Ministry of Agriculture (MOA).
 Past research results for comparison and
benchmarking
• The result will be compared using the current
system used by the farmers in their current
cultivating style and decision making.
• As what we know, the current approach in
their decision making comes from the expert
advice by LPP, MARDI and also MOA. But there
is no integrated system to help them in
decision making and also to monitor the
growth of their crops.
Methodology: Experimental procedures
• ,
• This experiment will be done to the Rambutan’s Farmers in Perak
Malaysia. The selected farmers are based on recommendation by LPP,
MARDI and MOA.
• First phase, all farmers will be observe through
– What they use in decision making in cultivating
– How do the expert advice them, and help to solve the problem.
– How do the farmers express their problem to the advisor?
• The farmers will be introduce and familiar to the prototype system, which
embedded the proposed framework
• Second phase, all farmers will be observe again with same criteria and
features but they use the proposed system @ framework.
• The evaluation will be consist of
– The growth of the crops
– The way to solved the problems
– The way to express the problems
– The effectiveness of the framework
Methodology: Experimental design number

• Design 2: One group pretest-posttest Design

• Sample : Rambutan farmers in Perak
• Treatment: Framework of e-peladang
• Observation:
– Through the growth of Rambutan within 3 months. The farmers will
observe the growth of Rambutan before and after treatment (the
size and the quality of the crops)
– Time completion in decision making to improve crops productivity
before and after treatment. For example the farmers had a problem
with the crops dealing with pesticide, fertilizer and weather or
crops problem, how does the system help then to solve the
problem.
 Methodology – how to organize
• The experiment will be divide into two phases. The first
phase, the farmers use the current approach to do the
cultivation. Then the farmers need to monitor the growth
of those crops with-in 3 months. How does the crop
growth and how do the farmers get an advice during that
time?
•  The second phase is after given the treatment, means the
farmers has used the system to assist them to do decision
making during cultivation. The same question will be ask
to the farmers regarding the growth of crops and also the
need of advice during cultivating.
• Iver Thysen, 2000. Agriculture in the Information Society. J. agric. Engng Res. (2000) 76,
297}303
• ICT roadmap in Malaysia ; www.mosti.gov.my/.../National%20ICT%20Roadmap%20for%20
Malaysia.pdf
• Md. Salleh Hassan, Hayrol Azril Mohamed Shaffril, Musa Abu Hassan and Jeffrey Lawrence D’
Silva (2009) Developing Agriculture in Malaysia: Internet Utilization among Malaysian Youth
Agro-Businessman. European Journal of Social Sciences – Volume 11, Number 2 (2009)
•  Allan Leck Jensen *, Peter S. Boll, Iver Thysen, B.K. Pathak (2000). Pl@nteInfo® — a web-
based system for personalised decision support in crop management. Computers and
Electronics in Agriculture Elsevier 25 (2000) 271–293
•  Allan Leck Jensen (2001) Building a web-based information system for variety selection in
field crops—objectives and results. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture
Volume 32, Issue 3, October 2001, Pages 195-211
• Sofianita Mutalib, Nurulwahidah Mohammad Azlan, Marina Yusoff, Shuzlina Abdul Rahman
dan Azlinah Mohamed (2008). Plant Selection System. International Conference on
Computational Sciences and Its Applications ICCSA 2008