Mike’s Digital Laboratory

An ontology for rice.

Agropedia is a social software site for agriculture. A first glance reveals blogs, forums, wiki and semantic web enabled repositories for knowledge about potatoes and peas!

Form the home page:

agropedia is an agriculture knowledge repository of universal meta models and localized content for a variety of users with appropriate interfaces built in collaborative mode in multiple languages. agropedia aims to develop a comprehensive digital content framework, platform, and tools in support of agricultural extension and outreach. In other words, it aspires to be a one stop shop for any information, pedagogic or practical knowledge related to extension services in Indian agriculture – an audiovisual encyclopedia, to enchant, educate and transform the process of digital content creation and organization completely.

Hmmm…. Well I like the part about “enchanting”. However it’s still very rough around the edges. I also noticed they are using CMap in a collaborative mode to create the ontologies. Browsing the graphic representations of knowledge map for rice reveals the difficult challenge of displaying large ontology models. It’s just difficult to navigate, but it does work. Of course my 24 inch iMac display makes it easier, I’m sure it’s a significant difference on an average display. On the other hand large displays are becoming more and more common. One of our students the other day showed up in the lab with his 24 inch iMac in tow as his “portable computer”. I believe he had one of these (or something like it)

Problem-o-pedia

One thing I just noticed is that apparently there are more than one “agropedia”s on net.  This may be a sign of the possibly worn out naming convention of fillintheblankpedia as a way to name a site.  Having used this convention myselff (to name “Excellupedia”) I can testify that we had some qualms about it, but went ahead with it anyway.  An interesting argument against this naming convention is that these sites can become (are) so much more than encylopedias about this or that…  It’s possible that with sites, like this one, we are building a new sort of thing that we don’t really have a good generic name for yet. (socialsoftwarewikiizedforumblogthingamijig  just wont do.) Or are we struggling with the possibility that we may be redefining what an encylopedia is.  Are we?  perhaps.