Title: Personalised web services for agricultural domain: a case study for recommending organic seeds to farmers and growers

Authors: Konstantinos Markellos, Penelope Markellou, Aglaia Liopa-Tsakalidi, Marina Staurianoudaki

Addresses: Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics, University of Patras, 26504 Patras, Greece. ' Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics, University of Patras, 26504 Patras, Greece. ' Department of Agricultural Mechanical and Water Resources Engineering, Technological Education Institute of Messolonghi, 30200 Messolonghi, Greece. ' Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics, University of Patras, 26504 Patras, Greece

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce RecOrgSeed, a model for producing interesting recommendations to organic farmers/growers. The whole process has been distinguished into two stages, one off-line that includes data preparation, ontology creation and usage mining and one online that concerns the recommendations production. The knowledge about farmers/growers (users) and seeds (products) is extracted from usage mining data and semantic annotations in conjunction with user-product ratings and matching techniques between users. The preliminary evaluation experiments show that even in the case of ||cold-start problem|| where no initial behavioural information is available, the approach can provide users with logical and relevant recommendations.

Keywords: organic farmers; organic growers; organic seeds; certified farming; semantic web mining; web usage mining; personalisation; seed recommendations; ontologies; association rules; personalised web services; recommender systems; agriculture.

DOI: 10.1504/IJED.2009.028545

International Journal of Electronic Democracy, 2009 Vol.1 No.2, pp.170 - 187

Published online: 18 Sep 2009 *

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