Diseases and Pests Identification in Maize – A Multilingual Scenario

Abstract

Abstract : Pests and diseases cause major economic losses to the farmers. The estimate loss per annum due to diseases and pests in a country like India touches to billions of Rupees. Most of the time farmers use over dosages of pesticides and fungicides to save their crop and thus cause environmental hazards. The presented expert system is designed to help farmers to identify diseases and insects attacking maize crop which is neither feasible nor practical by conventional system of extension. Traditional expert systems are based on rules and facts whereas the knowledge base of this expert system is built using ontology - the latest knowledge representation technique. OWL is the W3C specifications for building ontologies. It is based on XML and Unicode. Moreover, rule-based knowledge base is not inherently based on Unicode and thus lacks support for internationalization or for regional languages. The system acts as a tool for transferring the site and crop specific knowledge of various domain experts to the farmers. The system is integrated with the Maize Agridaksh. Agridaksh is a tool for developing online expert system of crops. India being a multilingual society with over 16 major languages and most of the farmers across the country understands their local language only. This system is multilingual and at present contains knowledge in English and Hindi languages.