The Use of UML as a Tool for the Formalisation of Standards and the Design of Ontologies in Agriculture

For the past 20 years, ontologies have become more and more popular in various research fields such as Web technologies, databases, information retrieval methods, and so forth. The first goal of this chapter is to answer general questions about ontologies, such as: What exactly is an ontology? What is the purpose of ontology? Which types of systems use an ontology? The second goal of the chapter is to help readers understand how UML can be used to model ontologies in agricultural systems. UML and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) are compared, and an example inspired by the French project named Farm Information Management is presented.

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