We developed an ontology management tool for ontological information such as agricultural vocabularies, standard vocabularies, and agricultural ontologies with the goal of supporting interoperability of agricultural information (i.e., data sharing and retrieval). In this study, we collected information from general agricultural dictionaries and thesauruses, keyword lists from existing agriculture information systems, and standard vocabularies developed by governmental agencies. We converted the vocabularies to the resource description framework (RDF)–Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) to the RDF/SKOS format, and developed an ontology broker to register, update, and retrieve the collected agricultural vocabularies based on the Semantic MediaWiki engine. The ontology broker comprises a tool for manipulating sparse large-dimensional matrices to retrieve text through multiple agricultural thesauruses that have been combined to find associations among the vocabularies. We also developed a WebAPI tool to provide online access to the ontology broker. Our proposed approach will improve interoperability and management of agricultural information by taking advantage of the vocabularies.

To acquire information on the agricultural environment of fields where it is difficult to ensure a stable power supply, we proposed an environmental information monitoring system based on autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). To implement the system, we developed the sensor module required to provide memory function, power saving, extensible ability to add sensors, time synchronization to reset the time using an environmental information collection terminal. As a proof of concept, we evaluated the communication range over which it was possible to stably collect environmental information by using the Zigbee wireless communication, and determined the time required for data transmission. The results showed that the communication range is about 20 m and the time required for data transmission is about 2.5 s at every hour. These results confirmed the feasibility of this system. We also carried out the environmental information collection in a farm field where the UAV can fly either on a fixed schedule or at variable intervals. The results showed that the proposed system performed stably during information collection in the field.