The Use of UML as a Tool for the Formalisation of Standards and the Design of Ontologies in Agriculture

For the past 20 years, ontologies have become more and more popular in various research fields such as web technologies, databases, information retrieval methods, etc. The first goal of this paper is to answer general questions about ontologies, such as: What exactly is an ontology? What is the purpose of on-tology? Which types of systems use an ontology? The second goal of the paper is to help readers understand how UML can be used to model ontologies in agricul-tural systems. UML and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) are compared, and an example inspired from the French project named Farm Information Manage-ment is presented.