Construction And Conversion Of Ontology In Agricultural Information Management

The term "ontology," derived from philosophy, is the study of being and existence. More recently, within the context of computer science, it has come to mean a conceptual schema consisting of rigorously defined concepts, attributes, relations, and rules defining a given domain.In recent years, many specialists in libriary science and information science, have great interest in the research of ontology, they research its potential applications in knowledge organization and information retrieval from various angles. In order to search after the theory and application value in agricultural information management, and to research the trend of thesaurus in the web age, this dissertation research the construction way of ontology, and the conversion way from thesaurus.Based on the introduction of ontology theory, the author uses KAON, the construction and maintainance tool of ontology, designed and completed the first Chinese food safety ontology prototype.This dissertation presents the methods used to build a food safety ontology prototype in Chinese. First, it describes the use of the Kaon Suite of tools to create the ontology. Second, it describes the selection of typical food safety papers from the web, from which 58 terms within the food safety domain were extracted to create the food safety core ontology. Third, about a thousand terms from the Chinese agricultural Thesaurus were selected and then incorporated programmatically into the food safety ontology using Java; additional food safety concepts from the Thesaurus were manually added. Fourth, the core and thesaurus ontology were combined. A corpus of 60 documents on food safety was collected, and merged into a single file. The file contained 160 thousand Chinese characters. The associated terms were sorted by frequency, and the high-frequency terms added to the ontology. The final work involved revision and maintenance. Using this methodology, a Chinese Food Safety Ontology prototype was created. However, this procedure can be used to create other domain ontologies. The author also discusses the conversion of a thesaurus to an ontology, the uses of ontology, and so on.This dissertation is one of the earlist ontology research in library and information science in China, the author first transfer a part of the Chinese Agricultural Thesaurus to RDFS ontology in China. Both the way of ontology construction and the transfer from thesaurus are innovative. It is useful to the research of theory and practice in China, and is helpful to develop intellectual information retrieval engine.