A great deal of information related to rice cultivation has been published on the web. Conventionally, this information is studied by end-users to identify pests, and to prevent production losses from rice diseases. Despite its benefits, such information has not yet been encoded in a machine-processable form. This research closes the gap by modeling the knowledge-bases using ontologies and semantic technologies. Our modeled ontologies are externalized from existing reliable sources only, and offer axioms that describe abnormal appearances in rice diseases (and insects) and the corresponding controls. In addition, we developed an expert system called RiceMan, based on our ontologies, to support technical and non-technical users for diagnosing problems from observed abnormalities. We also introduce a composition procedure that aggregates users’ observation data with others for realizing spreadable diseases. This procedure, together with ontology reasoning, lies at the heart of our methodology. Finally, we evaluate our methodology practically with four groups of stakeholders in Thailand: senior agronomists, junior agronomists, agricultural students, and ontology specialists. Both ontologies and RiceMan are evaluated to verify their correctness, usefulness, and usability in various aspects. Our experimental results show that ontology reasoning is a promising approach for this domain problem.

Chatbots have been used as a digital interactive learning tool in education. Designing a chatbot for young students has challenges in their capability to formulate sentences by typing. Teachers have a challenge to develop a chatbot for desired purposes as well as to suit their classes. This research proposes a ChatBlock framework that provides ChatBlock Tutor and ChatBlock Classroom interfaces to serve the target users. ChatBlock Tutor is designed as a block-based interface to support young students to connect various types of blocks for creating sentences. The formulated block-based sentences are used to make a conversation with the chatbot. On the other hand, the ChatBlock Classroom is developed to support teachers in preparing customizable content for a classroom in various formats, i.e., Q&As, learning materials, exercises, and quizzes. Finally, the design and development of ChatBlock is discussed and two case studies in primary schools are elaborated. We conduct a preliminary evaluation with a selected primary school and report the lessons learned from our study.