Precision agriculture in the realm of the Internet of Things is characterized by the collection of data from multiple sensors deployed on the farm. These data present a spatial, temporal, and semantic characterization, which further complicates the performance in the management and implementation of models and repositories. In turn, the lack of standards is reflected in insufficient interoperability between management solutions and other non-native services in the framework. In this paper, an innovative system for spatio-temporal semantic data management is proposed. It includes a data query system that allows farmers and users to solve queries daily, as well as feed decision-making, monitoring, and task automation solutions. In the proposal, a solution is provided to ensure service interoperability and is validated against two European smart farming platforms, namely AFarCloud and DEMETER. For the evaluation and validation of the proposed framework, a neural network is implemented, fed through STSDaMaS for training and validation, to provide accurate forecasts for the harvest and baling of forage legume crops for livestock feeding. As a result of the evaluation for the training and execution of neural networks, high performance on complex spatio-temporal semantic queries is exposed. The paper concludes with a distributed framework for managing complex spatio-temporal semantic data by offering service interoperability through data integration to external agricultural data models. Graphical Abstract

As the demand for food grows continuously, intelligent agriculture has drawn much attention due to its capability of producing great quantities of food efficiently. The main purpose of intelligent agriculture is to plan agricultural missions properly and use limited resources reasonably with minor human intervention. This paper proposes a Precision Farming System (PFS) as a Multi-Agent System (MAS). Components of PFS are treated as agents with different functionalities. These agents could form several coalitions to complete the complex agricultural missions cooperatively. In PFS, mission planning should consider several criteria, like expected benefit, energy consumption or equipment loss. Hence, mission planning could be treated as a Multi-objective Optimization Problem (MOP). In order to solve MOP, an improved algorithm, MP-PSOGA, is proposed, taking advantages of the Genetic Algorithms and Particle Swarm Optimization. A simulation, called precise pesticide spraying mission, is performed to verify the feasibility of the proposed approach. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed approach works properly. This approach enables the PFS to plan missions and allocate scarce resources efficiently. The theoretical analysis and simulation is a good foundation for the future study. Once the proposed approach is applied to a real scenario, it is expected to bring significant economic improvement.

Web Ontology Language (OWL) is designed to represent varied knowledge about things and the relationships of things. It is widely used to express complex models and address information heterogeneity of specific domains, such as underwater environments and robots. With the help of OWL, heterogeneous underwater robots are able to cooperate with each other by exchanging information with the same meaning and robot operators can organize the coordination easier. However, OWL has expressivity limitations on representing general rules, especially the statement “If … Then … Else …”. Fortunately, the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) has strong rule representation capabilities. In this paper, we propose a rule-based reasoner for inferring and providing query services based on OWL and SWRL. SWRL rules are directly inserted into the ontologies by several steps of model transformations instead of using a specific editor. In the verification experiments, the SWRL rules were successfully and efficiently inserted into the OWL-based ontologies, obtaining completely correct query results. This rule-based reasoner is a promising approach to increase the inference capability of ontology-based models and it achieves significant contributions when semantic queries are done.