Toward A Dairy Ontology to Support Precision Farming.

Precision farming is about improving farming processes through in-depth analysis of the generated data. Dairy farming, in particular, is being intensively computerized and hence a fertile soil for such applications. In our own project, we investigate the benefit of data analytics in optimizing dairy production. To that end, the Valacta centre of expertise shares a dataset recording the performances of dairy cows and farms in Eastern Canada. Here, we tackle the design of a domain ontology (DONT) on top of it. The dairy cattle performance ontology (DCPO) reconciles the complex structure to the heterogeneous nature of dairy data within a unified framework that ensures extensibility to external data. It also provides a common vocabulary for both stakeholders and automated knowledge management tools, and, in the longer term, should support explainability for predictive neural models. We present here the bottom-up process of DCPO design and summarize its current content. We also illustrate its present and future usages.