Cultivation planning application to enhance decision making among Sri Lankan farmers

As part of a larger project to develop a Mobile Based Information System (MBIS) to enhance livelihood activities of Sri Lankan farmers, we investigated how farmers access agricultural knowledge and apply the knowledge to do their tasks. As farmers found it difficult to access and find the required information among published knowledge currently available, crop ontology has been developed to query the factual knowledge in the context specific to a farmer. In the interviews that we conducted, we found that providing factual knowledge alone is not sufficient as farmers also lack the procedural knowledge to make use of the factual knowledge. Therefore, we developed a Cultivation Planning Application that has procedural knowledge embedded into several modules that allow farmers to perform tasks that help them in their decision making process.