Panorama das ontologias do domínio agrícola: estudo a partir da Análise de Conteúdo

Given the importance of agriculture to the economy of a nation and to the subsistence of humankind, this is one of the areas of knowledge that has made efforts to improve development and research across several areas of knowledge. The area of ​​Information Science (IS), which is concerned with aspects related to the management, organization, access and retrieval of information and knowledge, has the theoretical and methodological potential to contribute to studies in several areas of human knowledge, agriculture. Within this proposal, it is believed that the ontologies, one of the research objects of CI, can help in the sharing of knowledge among domain experts, enabling the improvement of processes and techniques for the improvement of research in this area. This study is part of a doctoral research, aimed at the development of ontologies in the context of Brazilian agriculture. Thus, it is specifically aimed to identify the current panorama of the ontologies of the agricultural domain, through a literature review. The methodological procedures adopted for the development of the work are divided into three stages, namely: 1) bibliographic survey; 2) selection of papers for study; 3) application of the Content Analysis technique to create four categories of analysis: subject, purpose, development methodology and evaluation / validation. It can be observed in the partially analyzed results that ontologies have, as far as the 'subject' category, a diversity of topics within the agriculture, revealing the innumerable possibilities of ontology construction in the area. In relation to the category 'ontology purpose' it is observed that the objectives of the ontologies vary between creating a model of representation of knowledge in a subdomain related to agriculture, and serve as the basis for some application. With respect to the category "development methodology", the construction of ontologies is predominant without the use of methodologies recognized in the literature, such as NeOn, Methontology, Method 101. Finally, the "evaluation / validation" category reveals the concern of the developers in the verification of the ontologies, since most of the proposals had some type of validation