Volume 2, Issue 3, March 2012

ISSN: 2277 128X

International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science and Software Engineering

Research Paper Available online at: www.ijarcsse.com

Knowledge Sharing using Ontology-A Date Palm Model

P.C Sherimon * Arab Open University [email protected] Reshmy Krishnan Muscat College Vinu.P.V Higher College Of Technology Abstract---Exchange of information and knowledge sharing becomes essential in more and more areas in society . As a reply to this increasing importance of information exchange, new technologies are being developed. semantic web is the prominent example of such technology. It addresses the problem of knowledge sharing and information exchange by providing advanced support for representing and processing information. Ontologies are back bone of the Semantic Web, in which they are used to specify standard conceptual vocabularies in which to exchange data among systems and publish reusable knowledge bases. An ontology defines a set of representational primitives with which to model a domain of knowledge or discourse. The representational primitives are typically classes (or sets), attributes (or properties), and relationships (or relations among class members). The date palm is the most enduring symbol of the Sultanate's rich heritage, alongside the other long-cherished aspects of traditional Omani life. Creating a ontology for Date palm and dates will enrich the farming group as well as a model for the research scholars in the agro farm area. KeywordsSemantic web, Knowledge sharing, Ontology, Information exchange, classes, properties 1.Introduction The world wide web is a massive depository of data .Searching of the web for a particular data is like searching a tree in a dense forest. As more information becomes available on the World Wide Web ,it becomes more difficult to provide effective search tools for information access. People use search engines such as yahoo,Google,MSN etc.. to find and share the information from the web. But users find difficulty in searching since they produce many inaccurate and irrelevant results. The existing search engines use keyword based searching. Keyword searching is the most common form of text search on the Web. Most search engines do their text query and retrieval using keywords. Keyword searches have a tough time distinguishing between words that are spelled the same way, but mean something different. Search engines also cannot return hits on keywords that mean the same, but are not actually entered in your query. A query on heart disease would not return a document that used the word "cardiac" instead of "heart." Since the searching is based only on the keywords, users may not get relevant answers for the context. In this regard semantic web can help the user in a more efficient way for information retrieval. Semantic search seeks to improve search accuracy by understanding searcher intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable data space, whether on the Web or within a closed system, to generate more relevant results. Semantic Search uses semantics, or the science of meaning in language, to produce highly relevant search results[1]. In most cases, the goal is to deliver the information queried by a user rather than have a user sort through a list of loosely related keyword results. Structured data sources like ontology act as the backbone to Semantic web for achieving such highly related results. Such technologies enable the formal articulation of domain knowledge at a high level of expressiveness and could enable the user to specify his intent in more detail at query time. Ontology means a specification of a conceptualization. That is, an ontology is a description (like a formal specification of a program) of the concepts and relationships that can exist for an agent or a community of agents. This definition is consistent with the usage of ontology as set-of-conceptdefinitions. II.Why to develop an Ontology? An ontology defines a common vocabulary for researchers who need to share information in a domain. It includes machine-interpretable definitions of basic concepts in the domain and relations among them. They are used as a unified framework or shared understanding of communication between people and systems[3].Sharing of the Information , reusing and updating of the existing ontology is the major merits of the Ontology development[2].By developing Ontology we can share the common understanding of the structure of information among people or software agents. Different websites may contain variety of details about

Volume 2, Issue 3, March 2012 the date palm. Through Ontology all these information can be aggregated and can be published .The users and agents can use this aggregated information to answer user queries or as input data to other applications.The Developed ontology can be reused in the future for other users. If they need to build a large ontology ,the existing ontologies describing portions of the large domain can be integrated .The existing ontology can be updated also. III.Ontology in knowledge sharing Ontology is a very effective search tool as far as semantic web is concerned. They can be described as the models which describe concepts and relations. When ontology is used as a search tool it consists of three abstraction levels including concepts, expression representing concepts ,matching models representing expressions as search keys[3].In ontology driven systems ,a knowledge base is built which is capable of answer user queries and browse the necessary knowledge. IV.Date Palm Taxonomy and Property Definition. The date palm is the most enduring symbol of the Sultanate's rich heritage, along with other cherished aspects of traditional Omani life. It has been the main wealth of people in past generations, the fruit serving as a source of daily nourishment, with the branches and the tree trunk proving valuable in the creation of a great many things that have been an integral part of the Omani home and household. Even today, date palm cultivation continues to be the mainstay of the vast majority of farmers in the Sultanate. Date palm species is so closely connected with human life .It not only provides a concentrated energy food, it also created a more amenable habitat for the people to live in by providing shade and protection from the desert winds. In addition, the date palm also yielded a variety of products for use in agricultural production and for domestic utensils, and practically all parts of the palm has a useful purpose.There have been numerous examples of accidental distribution of the date palm in the history, facilitated by the fact that dates lend themselves perfectly to being carried along as a high calorie food, with a longkeeping quality. Soldiers on the march, traders and discoverers - all may have had their influence in spreading the date palm by leaving the seeds behind after consumption of the fruit flesh. Creating a taxonomy for Date palm and dates will enrich the farming group as well as a model for the research scholers in the agro farm area. It is not always possible to build an all comprehensible ontology in a single stretch. It requires several iteration through several well equipped persons. We tried to create an ontology of Date palm and dates in minimum requirement basis.There are two main categories in the taxonomy such

www.ijarcsse.com as Date palm and dates.In the category of date palm,its products and species are described. A. Products Products of date palm can be divided into two, such as traditional use of palm products and natural uses of date palm. In the traditional uses, different applications of date palms are listed. Date palms can be used in basket making, create making, in giving good shape ,in handmade cord making and in heavy rope making.[13] Date palm application also include in pharmaceutical field .Date palm is very good for using as planks for making doors. In roof making also date palm leaves can be used. Applications of date palm consists of industrial row stock, animal feed, panel board and soil amendments. B Species. The main species of date palm is phoenix. As a group, there are about 13 different species of Phoenix. All are members of the Date Palm group. Plant size ranges from small to massively tall. Some are single trunk and others are clumped (suckering) with more than one stem. All are pinnate or feather type palms. In most areas, Phoenix live in rather arid conditions while a few species tolerate much more humid environments]14]. The common characteristics of phoenix are described such as the petioles are armed with spines, the leaves are induplicate and are dioecious etc.. All different types of phoenix is listed out with instances for each. C. Date Date class consists major categories of dates as subclasses such as ajwa, amer ahajj, Bashee, Deglected ,Noor ,Empress and Medjool. 1) Food:Dates has a leading role on the dining table of middle east. A good quality date drupe is a delicious fruit with a sweet taste and a fleshy mouthfeel. This is a highenergy food containing sugars and fibre thus being suitable for both people and livestock. The applications of dates in different food types are listed out such as condiments, deserts,etc..Date paste can be used in mixtures and bakery products. Dates can be used as a good preservative also. Whole pitted dates are also a delicious type of food. 2) Health:Health benefits of dates are uncountable, as this fruit is affluent in natural fibres. Dates are even rich in several vitamins and minerals. These natural products contain oil, calcium, sulphur, iron, potassium, phosphorous, manganese, copper and magnesium which are advantageous for health. It is said that consumption of one date daily is necessary for a balanced and healthy diet. Dates help in fighting constipation, intestinal disorders, weight gain, heart problems, diarrhoea and abdominal cancer. D. Developing stages The edible stages of ripening of date fruit could be divided into three phases .They are khalaal,Rotab and tamr. Fruit color is yellow in khalaal stage, Bright brown in rotab and then becomes dark brown in tamr stage. Even

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Volume 2, Issue 3, March 2012 though date is edible in all three phases,rotab is the most delicious.At khalaal stage weight gain is slow but sucrose content increases, moisture content goes down, and tannins will start to participate and lose their astringency. In rotab stage the tips of the fruit starting to turn brown and weight of the fruit will be reduced due to moisture loss. Softening of tissues, browning of the skin are also happening during this stage. When the they enter to tamr, the dates are left to ripen further on the palm[15]. E. Domain concept. In this section the Country of origin of each date and Date of origin is specified. F. Ingradients The main ingradients of dates are carbohydrates,Minerals and Vitamins.The Important minerals present in date fruit is Cu,Mg,Mn,K and Iron.Vitamins A,B,C and E are ther in date fruit in high quantity. G. Features Various features of different dates are listed out in this section. V..Date Palm Ontology and Implementation With the enormous application of semantic web, ontologies are become more wildely available. There is no single standard way to develop Ontology to define an ontology. It is not necessary to start from scratch always. If there is an ontology existing in that domain by a third party, it will give a good starting for our ontology. Updation is also possible to the existing ontology. The date palm ontology referred pepper ontology. The development of Ontology depends on the needs and expectations of the users of different services. We have to develop ontology based on the applications that you have in mind and the extensions that you anticipate. Ontologies are able to specify different kinds of concepts such as classes, relationships between things and properties of things. According to Noy and McGuinness[],the following phases are to be followed to develop ontology. A. Determine the domain and scope of the ontology. eveloping an ontology without any purpose is not a goal itself. Ontology is a model of a particular domain built for a particular purpose. In the same domain itself ontology will vary according to the purpose and type of query aims. An ontology is by necessity an abstraction of The construction of ontology determined by the use to which the ontology will put and by future extensions that are already anticipated. Basic questions to be answered at this stage are what is the domain and the ontology will cover? For what we are going to use the ontology? For what type of queries should the ontology provide answers? Who will be users of this ontology?we have considered the following questions in the construction of ontology. What are the applications of date palm? What are the major species of date palm?

www.ijarcsse.com What are the major types of dates? What are the features of each type of dates? What are the nutritional values of each type of date? The country and date of origin of each type of dates. The amount of minerals and vitamins in each type of dates. Since the date palm is considered the most important crop in Sultante Of Oman and has a significant presence among the Oman society and it is valued for its social, religious and agricultural value, we have identified the domain as datepalm and dates.We hope this will enrich the farming group as well as the model for the research scholars in the agro-farm area. B. Consider reuse. Ontology has become wildely available with the spreading of semantic web. Its always better to check for the particular ontology in the chosen domain. Rarely we have to start from the scratch. There is almost always an ontology available from a third party that provides a useful starting point of our ontology. There are so many libraries of reusable ontologies on the web such as Ontolingua Ontology library, DAML ontology library etc..Since the ontology for date palm is not available in the libaraies so far ,we have developed from scratch . C. List Key terms All the terms that is likely to appear in the ontology can be listed out. The relations among the classes and the properties of the classes and instances in the ontology also to be listed out. As per our domain, important terms include date palm, dates, minerals, vitamins, species, etc.. D. Define taxonomy After the identification of key terms, these terms must be organized in a taxonomic hierarchy. There are different approaches to define classes such as top-down, bottom-up and combined one. Whatever be the method following, it is important to ensure that the hierarchy is a taxonomic hierarchy. That is If B is a subclass of A, then every instance of B must also be an instance of A. Only this will ensure that we follow the built in semantics of primitives such as owl:subClassOf and rdfs:subClassOf.In the Date palm Ontology we follow the top-down approach. Date palm is the main root class. Subclasses of Date palm are Dates, Products and species. Under these subclasses, more subclasses are being defined. E.Define the properties of the classes. Properties define the relationships between two objects. There are two types of properties. Object properties and data properties. Object properties are used to link object to objects. Data Properties are used to link objects to xmlschema datatype. OWL has another property Annotation properties, to be used to add annotation information to classes, individuals, and properties. Different object properties such as has_ country of origin, has_ date of origin, has_ nutritional_ values etc.are used in the ontology. Properties can be allotted to a class. All subclasses of a class inherit the property of that class. If we apply the property, has_ features to the class dates ,the

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Volume 2, Issue 3, March 2012 same will be applicable for all subclasses of the class dates. Additional properties can be added to subclasses also. Data properties such as has_ botanical name, has _common name etc.. is added in the ontology. They are used to link the instance and a class. For giving a value to an instance in a class we use data properties. For example the common name for Barhee date is honey balls. The data property is applicable to each instance of a class. It cant be apply to a general class. F..Define the facets of a class Facets of a property describe the value type, allowed values, the cardinality and other features of the values the property can take. For example consider the property has _common name. The value type of this is string . 1)Value type:This describes the different types of values a property can take. The property has_date_of_origin has the value type Number. Other types include String, Boolean, Enumerated, Datetime,literal etc.. 2)Allowed values:This represents values allowed for different properties. The property has_common_name has allowed values are honey balls and visitors dates etc.. 3)Cardinality:A property can have single value or multiple values. Cardinality defines how many values a property can have. If the system allows at most a single value, it is single cardinality. Cardinality is multiple if it allows at least one value . G.Define instances Individual instances of the classes are created in the ontology. We use ontology to organize sets of instances. Since the number of instances in an ontology is quiet a large number when compared to the number of classes, creating instances is not done manually. Instead they are retrieved from legacy data sources such as databases. Automated extraction of instances from a text is also possible with the help of suitable plug-ins. VI.Implementation in Protg 4.2 A. classes and subclasses. Classes are the domain concepts and the building blocks of ontology. In Date palm ontology, Date palm is the subclass of OWL:Thing.

www.ijarcsse.com has subclasses like Benefits, Developing stages, Domain concepts, Ingredients and value partition.

The class Products has two subclasses such as Applications and Traditional use.

Different types of phoenix species constitutes the class species.

Fig.2.Middle level Date Palm Taxonomy B. Properties, facets and instances. In the Date palm ontology,object property and data property has been defines.Individuals are also defined in the ontology.This will be created by choosing a class and then inserting the values of properties. Fig.1.Top level Date Palm Taxonomy A class can have subclasses which represents the middle level Taxonomy. The following taxonomy shows Dates

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Volume 2, Issue 3, March 2012

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Fig.3.Individual canary_island_date_palm of species phoenix canariensis and its data properties. C. Class hierarchy in OWLVIz

Fig.4.Example of class hierarchy Using the plug in OWL VIz, the class hierarchy can be viewed .This allows comparison of asserted class hierarchy and inferred class hierarchy.The above figure shows the asserted model class hierarchy of Date palm ontology. D. Results DL Query tab is used to create queries.The following fig shows the results of various queries given in the Query Tab.

Fig.5.DL Query

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Volume 2, Issue 3, March 2012 VII.Conclusions Knowledge workers spend a substantial amount of their time browsing and reading to find out how documents are related to one another and where each falls into the overall structure of the problem domain. Exploitation of interrelationships between selected pieces of information can put isolated information into a meaningful context. This can be facilitated by the use of ontologies. Different websites may contain variety of details about the date palm. Through Ontology all these information can be aggregated and can be published .The users and agents can use this aggregated information to answer user queries or as input data to other applications.The Developed ontology can be reused in the future for other users. If they need to build a large ontology ,the existing ontologies describing portions of the large domain can be integrated .The existing ontology can be updated also. References 1.N.Noy, D.L. McGuinness, Ontology Development 101: A guide to creating your first ontology, Stanford Medical Informatics Technical Report No SMI-2001-0880,2000 2.Suomela, S., Kekalainen, J.: Ontology as a search-tool: A study of real user's query formulation with and without conceptual support. In: Proceedings of ECIR2005. LNCS 3408, Springer- Verlag (2005) 315-329. 3..Tom Gruber:Ontology : Encyclopedia of Database Systems, Ling Liu and M. Tamer zsu (Eds.), Springer-Verlag, 2009. 4..Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J. and Lassila, O. The Semantic Web, Scientific American, May 2001. Also http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ 5.Gruber, T. R., Toward Principles for the Design of Ontologies Used for Knowledge Sharing. International Journal Human-Computer Studies, 43(5-6):907-928, 1995.

www.ijarcsse.com 6.Guarino, N. Formal Ontology, Conceptual Analysis and Knowledge Representation, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 43(5-6):625640, 1995. 7. Neches, R., Fikes, R. E., Finin, T., Gruber, T. R., Patil, R., Senator, T., & Swartout, W. R. Enabling technology for knowledge sharing. AI Magazine, 12(3):16-36, 1991. 8. McGuinness, D. L. and van Harmelen, F. OWL Web Ontology Language. W3C Recommendation 10 February 2004. http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/ 9. John Davies, Alistair Duke and Audrius Stonkus: OntoShare: Using Ontologies for Knowledge Sharing: 10. T. Berners-Lee, J. Hendler, and O. Lassila: The Semantic Web. Scientific American (May 2001) 11. Goldman-Segall, R. & Rao, S.V.: A collaborative online digital data tool for creating living narratives,in : Organisational Knowledge Systems, 31st Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science, Hawaii,USA (1998) 12. D. Fensel: Ontologies: Silver Bullet for Knowledge Management and Electronic Commerce. SpringerVerlag, Berlin (2001) 13. http://www.junglemusic.net/articles/datepalms.html 14. tp://www.fao.org/DOCREP/006/Y4360E/y4360e0a.htm# TopOfPage 15. http://www.browndategarden.com/comparison.htm

Acknowledgemnet Steps for the construction of Ontology has been taken from Ontology Development 101: A guide to creating your first ontology by N.Noy, D.L.McGuinness.

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