An OWL-Based Context Model for U-Agricultural Environments

Services in ubiquitous agricultural environments could be more elaborate and autonomous by intercommunicating with various sensors and systems, based on the service architecture of the device-to-device or device-to-service. To do that, the situation information that sensors gain from agricultural environments should be recomposed into contexts, which can be understood or recognized by services and devices. In this paper, we propose an OWL-based context model for agricultural environments, which can be used as service execution conditions for various context-aware service applications based on ubiquitous sensor networks in u-agriculture. The proposed context model is based on OWL ontology, which can be easily and efficiently customized in the various fields of agricultural service domains. With the proposed context model, developers can easily implement context-aware agricultural services through idiomatic communication with device-to-device, sensor-to-sensor, or sensor-to-service in agricultural environments. Especially, we hope that the proposed context model can be greatly helpful in the developments of smart agricultural services in the cultivation environments equipped with various sensors such as greenhouse, glasshouse, and vertical farm and so on.