Knowledge-based Agricultural Hub

Transcription

1 Knowledge-based Agrcultural Hub 63 Knowledge-based Agrcultural Hub Faudzah Ahmad, Faculty of Informaton Technology, Unverst Utara Malaysa, Nur Haryan Zakara, Norlza Katuk, Nur Wan Rozan Shekh Osman, Abstract The paper proposes an approach to transform an nformaton based portal nto a knowledge-based hub. The study s made on the Agrbazaar, whch s an nformaton-based portal provded by the Department of Agrculture, Mnstry of Agrculture and Agr-based Industry, Malaysa. Bascally, the portal has been developed to offer an nternet-based commerce nfrastructure for buyers and sellers of agrculture products. Agrbazaar has been found to be successful n brdgng the rural connectvty between users locally and globally. The applcatons has been accepted and utlzed by a substantal number of users n Malaysa and other countres as well. However, the percentage of usage of the portal could be ncreased f t s made more compettve. One way to obtan a greater percentage of market shares s to reconstruct the portal nto a new paradgm whch s known as a knowledge-based hub. The transformaton approach proposed nvolves fve stages namely data repostory, metadata, knowledge-based servces, applcaton, and securty. The approach proposed ams to llustrate the use of exstng nformaton to reconstruct and transform the nformaton-based portal nto a knowledge-based hub. It s also ntended to serve as a model for transformng a nformaton based portal to a knowledge-based hub. 1. Introducton The technology of ICT has opened up more opportuntes for busnesses n agrculture, also known as agrbusness to expand locally and nternatonally. Today, agrbusness s operated va the Web through the use of the Internet technology and facltes. Thus, wth the new technology, t s possble for stakeholders n the agrcultural sector to communcate and exchange nformaton between the locals and nternatonals. The stakeholders are thus known as agr-communty. In Malaysa, a vrtual one stop center for specalzed nterest n agrculture has been developed by the government. Known as the Agrbazaar, the vrtual portal has been developed for the agr-communty who s nterested n purchasng or sellng agrcultural-based products. Besdes that, the vrtual portal enables the agrcommunty to obtan, dssemnate, promote and dscuss on matters related to agrcultural and busness. The Agrbazaar has been n operaton snce 2004 and varous comments from users have been obtaned through the portal. The Agrbazaar s an nformaton-based portal provded by the Department of Agrculture, Mnstry of Agrculture and Agr-based Industry. It s desgned to offer an nternet-based commerce nfrastructure for buyers and sellers of agrculture products. Agrbazaar has been launched on June 2004 wth 3 bascs modules whch are emake, esupport and epayment. The am of ths portal s to mprove market reach, effcency, and productvty among ndvduals or busnesses nvolve n buyng or sellng agrculture products. The Agrbazaar s consdered as a marketng channel whch allows ndvdual or organzatons to regster wth the applcaton n order to promote ther busnesses. Marketng channels can be of dfferent types, rangng from advertsng channels, order processng channels, to customer support channels [1]. Promotng the agrcultural products s a challengng tasks due to the nature of the products tself. Ths requres a good strategy of marketng. Agrbazaar has

2 64 Faudzah Ahmad,Nur Haryan Zakara,Norlza Katuk, and Nur Wan Rozan Shekh Osman been desgned to support the agrbusness entty va provdng a platform to promote agrculturebased products and servces. The opportunty gven by the Department of Agrculture (DOA) wll broaden of market sze of agrculture products. Ths s due to the fact that a web-based applcatons are easy to access anytme at anywhere n the world. It s proven by the number of foregn regstered users of Agrbazaar. These regstered users are from varous countres n the world whch ncludes Bahran, Bangladesh, Chna, Indonesa, Inda, Maldves, Mexco, Morocco, Mongola, Ngera, Netherlands, New Zealand, Pakstan, Swtzerland, Span, Vetnam, Sr Lanka, South Afrca, Syra, Tawan, The Unted States of Amerca, the Unted Kngdom and some more countres n the world. Ths study s the contnuaton of the prevous study made [2]. [2] hghlghted how knowledge relatng to agrculture s managed, and lsted ssues and challenges faced by the agrcommunty. Partcularly, the study found that the portal has benefted the agrcultural communty. Agrbazaar has been found to be successful n brdgng the rural connectvty between users locally and globally. The applcatons has been accepted and utlzed by a substantal number of users n Malaysa and other countres as well % of the users agree that the Agrbazaar portal provdes useful nformaton especally for the farmers. They found that the portal provdes useful drectory, and presents lots of nformaton on agrculture. Several users have turned nto successful entrepreneurs earnng mllons of Rnggt Malaysa annually after engagng ther busness through the portal. However, the usage of the portal could be ncreased f t s made more compettve. In the twenty-frst-century arena, compettve advantage can be acheved through globalzaton, technologcal development, and ncreasngly rapd dffuson of new technology, and use of knowledge [3]. In order to survve and prosper, systems or applcatons have to be desgned dfferently. Specfcally, they must look to new sources of compettve advantage and engage n new forms of competton. Ths, n turn, requres a new perspectve n the development of a portal. One way s to transform the exstng portal nto a knowledge based hub. The paper presents an approach to transform an nformaton based portal nto a knowledge-based hub. 2. The Agrbazaar Launched n the year 2004, the Agrbazaar s a web portal provded by the Department of Agrculture, Mnstry of Agrculture and Agrbased Industry. It has been developed for buyers and sellers of agrculture products [4]. Agrbazaar has 3 basc modules emake, esupport and epayment and ts man am s to provde a platform usng ICT technology as the underlyng tool to mprove market reach, effcency, and productvty among ndvduals or busnesses nvolve n buyng or sellng agrculture products. Generally, the Agrbazaar can be seen as a marketng channel that allows ndvdual or organzatons promote ther busnesses. Promotng the agrcultural products s a challengng tasks due to the nature of the products tself and thus, requres a good marketng strategy. Agrbazaar has been desgned to support the agrbusness entty va provdng a platform to promote agrculturebased products and servces. The opportunty gven by the Department of Agrculture (DOA) s ntended to broaden the market share n agrculture products. Users of Agrbazaar are global. Besdes the local people, the regstered users comes from varous countres such as Bahran, Bangladesh, Chna, Indonesa, Inda, Maldves, Maxco, Morocco, Mongola, Ngera, Netherlands, New Zealand, Pakstan, Swtzerland, Span, Vetnam, Sr Lanka, South Afrca, Syra, Tawan, The Unted States of Amerca, Unted Kngdom and others [5]. Statstcs on the percentage of local regstered users (taken on 13 August 2007) s shown n Table. 1.

3 Knowledge-based Agrcultural Hub 65 Table 1: Percentage of Agrbazaar regstered users accordng to states n Malaysa Country / State Users (%) Johor 9.55 Kedah 5.99 Kelantan 4.99 Kuala Lumpur Melaka 3.74 N.Semblan 4.99 Pahang 7.15 Perak 7.15 Perls 1.01 Putrajaya 1.08 Sabah 1.90 Sarawak 2.48 Selangor Terengganu 7.37 W.P. Labuan 0.39 Others 1.74 Table 1: Percentage of Agrbazaar regstered users accordng to states n Malaysa Source: N. Katuk et al., The nternatonal users are the mnorty group coverng less than 1% of the total Agrbazaar users. 3. Informaton-Based Versus Knowledge- Based Applcatons The noton of nformaton-based and knowledgebased applcatons has been commonly used n nformaton technology dscplnes. Even though there are smlar n nature, ther objectves n actual fact dffer. An nformaton-based applcaton system ams to provde statc nformaton through presentaton of varous knd of reports. Decsons are made based on these reports and most of the tme management people could not foresee problems to arse. It has been used nterchangeably wth other terms such as nformaton system, nformaton, computerbased nformaton system, and management nformaton system. It s a system that uses computer technology to perform some or all of ts ntended tasks [6]. A knowledge-based applcaton system, however, s an applcaton system that ncorporates knowledge dscovery approach to facltate ts retreval, analyss, and extracton from a large pool of data. Its major objectve s to dentfy vald, novel, potentally useful, and ultmately understandable patterns n data. The Agrbazaar at present only provdes statc nformaton for the agrcultural communty. At mentoned n secton 2, the portal even though has been found to be useful has not been able to capture more percentage of users. One way to obtan a greater percentage of market share s to reconstruct the portal nto a new paradgm whch s known as a knowledge-based hub. The next secton wll dscuss the transformaton approach. 4. Transformaton Approach The approach ncorporates the knowledge-based dscovery and busness ntellgence methodology. Bascally the approach conssts of four stages: () Data repostory, () Metadata, () knowledge extracton servces, (v) applcaton, and (v) securty. Fgure 2 llustrates the respectve stages. () Data repostory. Ths stage nvolves buldng the data repostory. The nformaton publshed on the portal can be stored n a varety of formats and may resde n a centralzed data repostory or dstrbuted across multple stes. It can be n a statc form or dynamc. All the nformaton wll be gathered and then grouped n clusters. () Metadata. Ths stage concerns about controllng the qualty of data gathered. All data gathered from dfferent sources should be standardzed n terms of format, unts, and defntons. At ths pont data resded has to be completely free from noses, duplcatons etc. () Knowledge extracton servces. The stage bascally dentfes varous methods to extract knowledge. The extracton stage presents varous optons, tools, or technques that can be used by users to uncover hdden pattern or known as knowledge. Varous technques can be appled for extractng knowledge. Examples are ad-hoc query analyss, data mnng, and vsualzaton.

4 66 Faudzah Ahmad,Nur Haryan Zakara,Norlza Katuk, and Nur Wan Rozan Shekh Osman (v) Applcaton. Several applcatons dentfed n stage () wll be developed. The applcatons wll be user-frendly such that users do not need to go through complexty process n obtanng knowledge. The applcatons may ncorporate OLAP tools, data mnng tasks such as clusterng, assocaton and classfcaton, and vsualzaton capabltes. (v) Securty. The fnal stage nvolves mplementng securty measures and threats to the knowledge-based portal. Systems can be damaged for many reasons. Some may be ntentonal, whle others may be unntentonal. Proper measures such enforcng access controls, data securty controls, admnstratve controls, network controls, applcatons controls helps n preventng such occurrences. The approach can be llustrated as n Fg. 1 below: S e c u r t y Fg. 1. Knowledge-based portal approach 5. Concluson Knowledge-based portal Knowledge Extracton Servces Metadata Data repostory The Agrbazaar portal s a growng nformaton source for agrcultural users, supplers, customers to support ther busnesses. The portal has been accepted and utlzed by a substantal number of users n Malaysa. However, the usage of the portal could be ncreased f t s made more compettve. In order to survve and prosper, systems or applcatons have to be A p p l c t o n s desgned dfferently. Specfcally, they must look to new sources of compettve advantage and engage n new forms of competton. Ths, n turn, requres a new perspectve n the development of a portal. One way s to transform the exstng portal nto a knowledge based hub. The paper presents an approach to transform an nformaton based portal nto a knowledge-based hub. The transformaton approach presented nvolves fve stages namely data repostory, metadata, knowledge-based servces, applcaton, and securty. The approach proposed ams to llustrate the use of exstng nformaton to reconstruct and transform the nformaton-based portal nto a knowledge-based hub. It s also ntended to serve as a model for transformng a nformaton based portal to a knowledge-based hub. 6. References [1] L.C.Y. Wong, 2007, Development of Malaysa s Agrcultural Sector: Agrculture as an Engne of Growth. ISEAS Conference on the Malaysan Economy: Development and Challenges January, Sngapore. Retreved Sept 18, 2007 from al_dsputes_n_east%20asa.pdf [2] F. Ahmad, W. R. S. Osman, N. Katuk, N.H. Zakara, Nor Farzana Abdul Ghan & Kamarul Fazal Hashm. Issues And Challenges Of Malaysan Rural ICT: The Case Of Agrbazaar, Internatonal Conference on Rural ICT and Development (RICTD07), Faculty of Informaton Technology, Unverst Utara Malaysa, UUM Sntok, Kedah Darulaman, Malaysa. [3] Htt, Mchael, Keats, Barbara & DeMare, Samuel Navgatng n the New Compettve Landscape: Buldng Compettve Advantage and Strategc Flexblty n the 21 st Century. Academy of Management Executve, 12(4): [4] The Agrbazaar, 2007, Agrbazaar: Exchange for Better Prce. Retreved Aug 13, 2007 from [5] N. Katuk, N. H. Zakara, F. Ahmad 3, W. R. Shekh Osman,N. F. Abdul Ghan & K. F. Hashm. The Implementaton Of Web-Based

5 Knowledge-based Agrcultural Hub 67 Applcaton For Agrbusness In Malaysa: The Case Of Agrbazaar, Internatonal Conference on Rural ICT and Development (RICTD07), Faculty of Informaton Technology, Unverst Utara Malaysa, UUM Sntok, Kedah Darulaman, Malaysa [6] E. Turban, R. K. J. Raner, R. E. Potter. Introducton to Informaton technology, Wley Internatonal Edton, [7] M.P. Evan, A.D. Phppen, G. Mueller, S.M Furnell, P.W. Sanders, and P.L. Reynolds. Strateges for Content Mgraton on the World Wde Web. Internet Research: Electronc Networkng Applcatons and Polcy, Vol. 9, No. 1, 1999, pp [8] J.M. Gallaugher. Portal Combat: An Emprcal Study of Competton n the Web Portal Industry. Journal of Informaton Technology Management. Vol. 11, No. 1-2, 2000, pp [9] J. Hefln, (Ed.), 2003, Web Ontology Language (OWL): use cases and requrements, W3C workng draft, 31 March, Retreve August 2, 2007 from Copyrght 2008 by the Internatonal Busness Informaton Management Assocaton. All rghts reserved. No part or all of ths work should be coped or reproduced n dgtal, hard, or any other format for commercal use wthout wrtten permsson. To purchase reprnts of ths artcle please e-mal: admn@bma.org.