Query: INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR FARMERS IN SRI LANKA

title: Design for Empowerment: Empowering Sri Lankan Farmers through Mobile based Information System
abstract: We developed a mobile based information system (MBIS) to empower users to improve their livelihood activities. To do so, we first developed an empowerment framework (since one does not exist) as a basis to develop the MBIS. In particular, we conducted this research to solve an agriculture over production problem in Sri Lanka where farmers remain trapped in a poverty cycle. They cannot make informed decisions due to lack of access to timely, contextbased actionable information to achieve a good revenue. We had to generate some essential information such as current production level in real time by capturing farmers' decisions such as what and how much to grow. For this purpose, we needed to empower farmers to actively engage them in informed decision making process through the MBIS. In evaluating the impact of the MBIS, we found a statistically significant positive change in farmers' empowerment levels based on measuring self efficacy, sense of control, and motivation before and after they used the application. Commercial organizations have since adopted this mobile based system in India and Sri Lanka to solve agricultural problems, in universities Africa to mitigate hidden hunger, and the Corporative Research Center in Australia to develop digital health applications to manage chronic diseases, which indicates the approach's wide adoptability.

title: Harnessing Mobile Pervasive Computing to Enhance Livelihood Processes: Farmer Response to a Mobile Agriculture Information System
abstract: Mobile technology is a remarkable milestone in the current advances in Information and Communication Technologies. It is pervasive and is evolving rapidly across nations. This mobile revolution had opened up new avenues and opportunities, to design innovative solutions to support livelihood activities of people in developing countries. Agriculture in Sri Lanka is a sector which had not been fully exploited to identify the potential of developing innovative solutions to support farming activities. Timely and relevant agriculture information is essential for farmers to make effective decisions which would in turn empower them. Providing the right information at the right time required for farming activities is a major challenge as this information is available in different places in different formats. We developed a mobile agriculture information system and deployed among thirty farmers due to the high mobile penetration reported among farmers in Sri Lanka. The deployed artefact was field tested to ensure its suitability to support their daily decision making process. The sample group strongly endorsed mobile artefact and mentioned the potential of harnessing the agriculture knowledge.

title: Interplay of Requirements Engineering and Human Computer Interaction Approaches in the Evolution of a Mobile Agriculture Information System
abstract: Very high adoption of mobile phones in developing countries can be used to empower people engaged in various sectors such as agriculture, fisheries and healthcare by providing timely information in right context, thus facilitating them to make informed decisions. Having identified lack of such information is badly affecting farmers in Sri Lanka we embarked on a project to develop a mobile based agriculture information system. We had to combine different theories and methods both from Requirements Engineering (RE) and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) on a need basis to successfully gather the requirements. When we retraced the process we saw a definitive systematic pattern as to how RE and HCI can be used to enrich such an artefact; highlighting the strong interplay between RE and HCI. Discovery of this pattern enabled us to generalise the process.

title: Developing a community based knowledge system: a case study using Sri Lankan agriculture
abstract: The Agriculture sector plays a vital role in Sri Lanka's economy. Not having an agricultural knowledge repository that can be easily accessed by people in agriculture community in Sri Lanka within their own context, is a major problem. As a solution, a large user centred ontology for Sri Lankan farmers was developed to provide required information/knowledge not only in a structured and complete way, but also in a context specific manner. Since this problem is not only limited to farmers, we extend this for every one working in the agriculture domain. We validate the ontology in terms of accuracy and quality. The online knowledge base based on the ontology with a SPARQL endpoint was created to share and reuse the domain knowledge that can be queried based on user context. A Mobile based application and a Web based application were developed to provide information/knowledge by using this ontology. These applications are also used to evaluate the ontology by getting the feedbacks from users to the knowledge in the ontology. It is very difficult to maintain a large complex ontology. To maintain our ontology, we identified various processes that are required to develop and maintain ontology as a collaborative process. A semi automatic end to end ontology management system was developed to manage the developed ontology and the knowledge base. It provides the facilities to reuse, share, modify, extendand prune the ontology components as required. The facilities to capture users' information needs and search domain information in user context are also included. In this paper, we present a summary of the overall development process of the ontology including the end to end ontology management system.

title: Designing a Farmer Centred Ontology for Social Life Network
abstract: Rapid adoption of mobile phones has vastly improved access to information. Yet finding the information within the context in which information is required in a timely manner is a challenge. To investigate some of the underlying farmer centric research challenges a large International Collaborative Research Project to develop mobile based information systems for people in developing countries has been launched. One major sub project is to develop a Social Life Network; a mobile based information system for farmers in Sri Lanka. Lack of timely information with respect to their preferences and needs to support farming activities is creating many problems for farmers in Sri Lanka. For instance, farmers need agricultural information within the context of location of their farm land, their economic condition, their interest and beliefs, and available agricultural equipment. As a part of this project we investigated how we can create a knowledge repository of agricultural information to respond to user queries taking into account the context in which the information is needed. Because of the complex nature of the relationships among various concepts we selected an ontological approach that supports first order logic to create the knowledge repository. We first identified set of questions that reflect various motivation scenarios. Next we created a model to represent user context. Then we developed a novel approach to derive the competency questions incorporating user context. These competency questions were used to identify the concepts, relationships and axioms to develop the ontology. Initial system was trialled with a group of farmers in Sri Lanka. There was universal agreement among the farmers participated in the field trial to varying degree (strongly agree, agree, moderately agree) to the question "All information for the crop selection stage is provided"

title: Development of a simple sprinkler system designing and pump selection expert system (SSSDPS expert)
abstract: In Sri Lanka most of the micro irrigation systems such as sprinkler irrigation systems are installed with the help of manual based decision making or in many cases without proper designing procedures. These systems do not perform to the expectations. The problems encountered are low water use efficiency due to losses and improper distributions. An expert system with all the design criteria could help non technical and inexperienced irrigation system installers and farmers. Therefore, this study was done with the objective to develop an expert system for simple sprinkler irrigation system designing and pump selection for efficient water resource use in Sri Lanka. Needed data for the designing, such as crop data, soil data, pump data, pipe data and climatic information were collected from many published reports. Then crop water requirements and irrigation intervals were calculated using standard procedures. Irrigation block selection, lateral pipe selection and main line selection were done through a set of rules and conditional statements. The wxCLIPS was used to represent the knowledge, rules and conditional statements and to develop the Graphical User Interface of the expert system. The developed expert system (Simple Sprinkler System Designing Expert SystemsSSSDPS Expert) can be used easily by interacting with it. The interaction is by just selecting the inputs according to the user's locality and providing simple information through text windows according to the land area. This system generates very accurate outputs and it is shown in the text window. The user can compare many alternate systems through simple interactions with the expert system as it is not taking much time to generate different designs.  In Sri Lanka, most of the large scale farms are commercialized and mechanized to obtain higher crop production and profit. Small scale farmers have started to use advanced technologies in order to maximize the efficiency of available resources. Various agronomic practices such as land preparation, irrigation management, fertilizer application etc. play a major role in achieving the farming objectives. Development of a proper irrigation system is one of the major agronomic practices in increasing the crop productivity. Anyway, manual based decision making is still applied in irrigation system designing and pump selection. It is very difficult to obtain or check variable performances for many possible alternatives with manual decision making. Development of A Simple Sprinkler System Designing and Pump Selection Expert System (SSSDPS Expert) Water Resources Research in Sri Lanka Expert system is a branch of AI (Artificial Intelligence) that makes extensive use of specialized knowledge to solve problems at the level of human expert. An expert is a person who has expertise in a certain area. Expert has a knowledge or special skills that is not known or available to most people. "Expert system" is an intelligent computer program that uses knowledge and inference procedures to solve problems that are difficult enough to require significant human expertise for their solution.  The knowledge in an expert system may be either the expertise or knowledge, which is generally available from books, magazines, and knowledgeable people. The term expert system, knowledge based system or knowledge based expert system are often used synonymously. An Expert system is one of the important application oriented branches of Artificial Intelligence. In the past decade, a great deal of expert systems had been developed and applied to many fields such as office automation, science, medicine, agriculture, etc. At beginning of the development of the agriculture expert systems, the areas selected are applications such as diseases diagnosis, pests of various crops, fertilizer application, crop protection, post harvest technology of fruits and vegetables and irrigation management. Few Expert Systems are reported for problem solving in the domain of irrigation engineering (Nevo and Amir, 1991; Srinivasan et al. 1991; Mohan and Arumugam, 1995; Linda et al. 1998; Kuo et al. 2000; Silva et al. 2001 and other) Kuo et al. (2000) applied on farm irrigation scheduling and genetic algorithm to optimize economic profits, simulate water demand, crop yields and area cultivated to each crop according to constraints. Linda et al. (1998) developed a decision support system (DSS) for improved irrigation practices, which considers the irrigation management plan prepared by the farmer. Srinivasan et al. (1991) developed an expert system for decision making on water management in an irrigation project, which determine the type of scheduling based on the computed water requirement, water availability data and general information about the site conditions. An expert system intended to assist in the diagnosis of centrifugal pump problems (TPUMPX) is recorded (Mario et al. 2004) A number of references were consulted concerning pump application and diagnosis. Individual manufacturers often produce troubleshooting guides for their products. Information acquisition interview process is a summarized excellent form with many checklists and other aids that have been developed to assist the technician. Check lists, and other aids have been summarized in a set of 'flowchart' style blocks similar to decision trees. These were then used to establish rules for the expert system. These were also used to verify the expert system. The development of a user friendly expert system for sprinkler system designing and pump selection is much more important in accurate decision making because no one uses such a system in Sri Lanka for this purpose. By developing an expert system, accurate pump selection, designing a better system layout, etc. could be B.G.A. Abeyrathne, M.M.M Najim and D.N. Jayatissa Water Professionals' Day Symposium October, 2005 done according to the user requirement with least efforts in terms of time. Errors could be included when this process is done without an expert so that the expert system will help avoid such problems in pump selection. Development of an exclusive expert system incorporating many variables is a continuous and laborious process. This paper presents the preliminary development of such an expert system. The main objective of this study is to encapsulate specific knowledge on simple sprinkler systems designing and pump selection to a specific expert system.

title: Measuring Empowerment to evaluate the impact of a Mobile Based Information System for Sri Lankan Farmers
abstract: We are investigating ways to empower Sri Lankan farmers through a technology based intervention to enhance their livelihood activities. Using empowerment theory and related concepts, we have created a conceptual model of psychological empowerment and identified a person's level of empowerment as a reflection of their sense of control, self efficacy, competence and motivation. We interviewed 50 farmers and used content analysis to identify the empowerment concepts in our model and measure their current level of empowerment. This paper reports our method for determining empowerment levels and provides findings from our interviews. The results revealed that the majority of farmers have low sense of control, average levels of self efficacy and high levels of farming knowledge but lack of access to timely information reduced their competency in dealing with new problems. The method will be used in followup interviews to determine whether levels of empowerment have increased as a result of technology intervention.

title: Factors that Influence Farmers' Information Seeking Behaviour: A Study of Sri Lankan Vegetable Farmers
abstract: Information and communication technology (ICT) plays a vital role in disseminating agricultural information. In this backdrop, to make use of ICT for a prolific agriculture information dissemination, it is vitally important to gain a comprehensive understanding of the farmers' information seeking behaviour. Despite the vitality, very few informational studies have been carried in Sri Lankan agriculture, particularly with respect to vegetable farmers in the country. To bridge this existing knowledge gap, this study sets out to investigate the information seeking behaviour (ISB) of vegetable farmers in Sri Lanka. Wilson's general model of information seeking behaviour 1996 was selected to guide the present study. Primary data were collected through a questionnaire survey of 289 vegetable farmers and were analysed by performing a regression analysis. The regression analysis revealed that vegetable farmers' ISB is greatly influenced by their information need and the channel characteristics. The regression results further revealed that the demographic characteristics such as age, education, farming experience and training, operational factors such as land extent, land ownership and types of farming system, and personal and role related factors such as perception of agri information and information sharing behaviour also influence vegetable farmers' ISB significantly. The study findings will inform the policymakers, information systems and applications designers, and researchers about the factors that affecting on ISB of farmers. Furthermore, this study will help stimulate similar studies in developing countries.

title: Digital Knowledge Ecosystem for Achieving Sustainable Agriculture Production: A Case Study from Sri Lanka
abstract: Crop production problems are common in Sri Lanka which severely effect rural farmers, agriculture sector and the country's economy as a whole. A deeper analysis revealed that the root cause was farmers and other stakeholders in the domain not receiving right information at the right time in the right format. Inspired by the rapid growth of mobile phone usage among farmers a mobile based solution is sought to overcome this information gap. Farmers needed published information (quasi static) about crops, pests, diseases, land preparation, growing and harvesting methods and real time situational information (dynamic) such as current crop production and market prices. This situational information is also needed by agriculture department, agro chemical companies, buyers and various government agencies to ensure food security through effective supply chain planning whilst minimising waste. We developed a notion of context specific actionable information which enables user to act with least amount of further processing. User centered agriculture ontology was developed to convert published quasi static information to actionable information. We adopted empowerment theory to create empowerment oriented farming processes to motivate farmers to act on this information and aggregated the transaction data to generate situational information. This created a holistic information flow model for agriculture domain similar to energy flow in biological ecosystems. Consequently, the initial Mobile based Information System evolved into a Digital Knowledge Ecosystem that can predict current production situation in near real enabling government agencies to dynamically adjust the incentives offered to farmers for growing different types of crops to achieve sustainable agriculture production through crop diversification.

title: User centered ontology for Sri Lankan farmers
abstract: Farmers in Sri Lanka are badly affected by not being able to get vital information required to support their farming activities in a timely manner. Some of the required information can be found in government websites, agriculture department leaflets, and through radio and television programs on agriculture. This knowledge is not reaching the farmers due to its unstructured, incomplete, varied formats, and lack of targeted delivery methods. Thus finding the right information within the context in which information is required in a timely manner is a challenge. The information and knowledge needs to be provided not only in a structured and complete way, but also in a context specific manner. For instance, farmers need agricultural information within the context of location of their farm land, their economic condition, their interest and beliefs, and available agricultural equipment. To investigate some of the underlying farmer centric research challenges an International Collaborative Research Project to develop mobile based information systems for people in developing countries has been launched. Farmer centered ontology was developed as part of this project. Agricultural information has strong local characteristics in relation to climate, culture, history, languages, and local plant varieties. These local characteristics as well as the need to provide information in a context specific manner made us develop this user centered ontology for Sri Lankan farmers. Because of the complex nature of the relationships among various concepts we selected an ontological approach that supports description logic to create the knowledge repository. For this we developed a new approach to model the domain knowledge to meet particular access requirements of the farmers in Sri Lanka. Through this approach, we have investigated how to create a knowledge repository of agricultural information to respond to user queries taking into account the context in which information is needed by farmers at various stages of the farming life cycle. The Delphi Method and the OOPS! (web based tool) were used to validate the ontology. Initial system was trialed with a group of farmers in Sri Lanka. The online knowledge base with a SPARQL endpoint was created to share and reuse the domain knowledge that can be queried based on farmer context.