Ontology Based Data Access and Integration for Improving the Effectiveness of Farming in Nepal

It is widely accepted that food supply and quality are major problems in the 21st century. Due to the growth of the world's population, there is a pressing need to improve the productivity of agricultural crops, which hinges on different factors such as geographical location, soil type, weather condition and particular attributes of the crops to plant. In many regions of the world, information about those factors is not readily accessible and dispersed across a multitude of different sources. One of those regions is Nepal, in which the lack of access to this knowledge poses a significant burden for agricultural planning and decision making. Making such knowledge more accessible can boot up a farmer's living standard and increase their competitiveness on national and global markets. In this article, we show how we converted several available, although not easily accessible, datasets to RDF, thereby lowering the barrier for data re-usage and integration. We describe the conversion, linking, and publication process as well as use cases, which can be implemented using the farming datasets in Nepal.