About

Digital Agrifood ecosystems play a significant role in sustaining food security towards achieving Zero Hunger (SDG1) and No Poverty (SDG2). To that end, closed-loop information ecosystems are essential to provide timely information to empower the stakeholders, particularly the farmers engaged in the agriculture sector, to make actionable decisions. The objective of the research group is to explore emerging technologies in developing a digital Agrifood ecosystem to deliver contextualized, just-in-time information assistance and support for the livelihood activities of the stakeholders. Emerging new technologies in IT will enable new applications to enhance the efficiency in agricultural activities to achieve well-being and sustainability. To this end, the group explores the new techniques to manage agricultural data and knowledge and investigates the applicability of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, IoT, sensors, drones in Agri tech to make actionable decisions. The research group was formed in 2011 as an international collaborative research group involving researchers from Sri Lanka (University of Colombo School of Computing, University of Ruhuna), Australia, Italy, and the USA. The second phase of this project, named Govi Nena, was mentioned as an innovative project at the 2016 Budget Speech.

History in a Glance

Phase 01

Phase 02

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Formation of the research group (Name of the research Group: SLN4F)

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First Field Trial

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First Prototype Evaluation

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Refined System Evaluation

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Deployment of the digital Knowledge ecosystem

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Publications

  • De Silva, L., Goonetillake, J., Wikramanayake, G., and Ginige, A. “Towards an Agriculture Information Ecosystem,” Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS) Auckland, New Zealand, 2014.
  • De Silva, L., Goonetillake, J., Wikramanayake, G., Ginige, A., Ginige, T., Vitiello, G., Sebillo, M., Giovanni, D. P., Tortora, G., and Tucci, M. “Design science research based blended approach for usability driven requirements gathering and application development,” 22nd IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE 2014) Usability and Accessibility Focused Requirements Engineering (UsARE 2014) Workshop IEEE, Karlskrona, Sweden, 2014, pp. 17-24.
  • Ginige, A., De Silva, L., Ginige, T., Giovanni, P., Walisadeera, A. I., Mathai, M., Goonetillake, J., Wikramanayake, G., Vitiello, G., and Sebillo, M. “Towards an agriculture knowledge ecosystem: a social life network for farmers in Sri Lanka,” 9th Conference of the Asian Federation for Information Technology in Agriculture (AFITA 2014): ICT’s for future Economic and Sustainable Agricultural Systems, Perth, Australia, 2014, pp. 170-179.
  • De Silva, L. N., Goonetillake, J. S., Wikramanayake, G. N., and Ginige, A. “Farmer response towards the initial agriculture information dissemination mobile prototype,” The 13th International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications (ICCSA 2013), HoChi Minh City, Vietnam, 2013, Springer LNCS, B. Murgante (ed.), pp. 264-278.
  • De Silva, L., Goonetillake, J. S., Wikramanayake, G. N., and Ginige, A. “A Holistic Mobile Based Information System to Enhance Farming Activities in Sri Lanka,” The IASTED International Conference on Engineering and Applied Science (EAS), Colombo, Sri Lanka 2012.
  • De Silva, L. N., Goonetillake, J. S., Wikramanayake, G. N., and Ginige, A. “Towards using ICT to enhance flow of information to aid farmer sustainability in Sri Lanka,” The 23rd Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS) 2012 ACIS, Geelong, Australia, 2012.
  • Di Giovanni, P., Romano, M., Sebillo, M., Tortora, G., Vitiello, G., Ginige, T., De Silva, L., Goonethilaka, J., Wikramanayake, G., and Ginige, A. “Building Social Life Networks through Mobile Interfaces- the Case Study of Sri Lanka Farmers ” In Organizational Change and Information Systems: Working and Living Together in New Ways2013, Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation (LNISO) Springer Berlin Heidelberg P. Spagnoletti (ed.), pp. 399-408.
  • Giovanni, P. D., Romano, M., Sebillo, M., Tortora, G., Vitiello, G., De Silva, L. N., Goonethilaka, J., Wikramanayake, G., Ginige, T., and Ginige, A. 2012. “User Centered Scenario based Approach for Developing Mobile Interfaces for Social Life Networks,” in 34th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2012) – UsARE Workshops: Zurich, Switzerland.
  • De Silva, L., Ginige, T., Di Giovanni, P., Mathai, M., Goonetillake, J., Wikramanayake, G., Sebillo, M., Vitiello, G., Tortora, G., Tucci, M., and Ginige, A. 2016. “Interplay of Requirements Engineering and Human Computer Interaction Approaches in the Evolution of a Mobile Agriculture Information System,” in Usability- and Accessibility-Focused Requirements Engineering: First International Workshop, UsARE 2012, Held in Conjunction with ICSE 2012, Zurich, Switzerland, June 4, 2012 and Second International Workshop, UsARE 2014, Held in Conjunction with RE 2014, Karlskrona, Sweden, August 25, 2014, Revised Selected Papers, A. Ebert, S. R. Humayoun, N. Seyff, A. Perini and S. D. J. Barbosa (eds.), Springer International Publishing: Cham, pp. 135-159.
  • Walisadeera, A.I., Ginige, A., and Wikramanayake, G.N. User Centered Ontology for Sri Lankan Farmers, Ecological Informatics Journal, 26(2), 140-150 (2015) (Impact factor: 1.98)
  • Walisadeera, A.I., Ginige, A., and Wikramanayake, G.N. Developing a Community-Based Knowledge System: A Case Study using Sri Lankan Agriculture. International Journal on Advances in ICT for Emerging Regions, 8(1), 119-129, (2016)
  • Walisadeera, A.I., Wikramanayake, G.N., and Ginige, A. An Ontological Approach to Meet Information Needs of Farmers in Sri Lanka. In: Murgante, B. et al. (Eds.), 2013 International Conference on Computational Science and its Applications (ICCSA 2013). Part I, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), 7971, pp. 264–278. Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (2013).
  • Walisadeera, A.I., Ginige, A., and Wikramanayake, G.N. Conceptualizing Crop Life Cycle Events to Create a User Centered Ontology for Farmers. In: B. Murgante et al. (Eds.), 14th International Conference on Computational Science and Applications (ICCSA 2014). Part V, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), 8583, pp. 791–806. Springer International Publishing Switzerland, Guimaraes, Portugal (2014).
  • Walisadeera, A.I., Ginige, A., and Wikramanayake, G.N. Ontology Evaluation Approaches: A Case Study from Agriculture Domain. In: O. Gervasi et al. (Eds.), 16th International Conference on Computational Science and Applications (ICCSA, 2016). Part IV, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), 9789, pp. 318–333. Springer International Publishing Switzerland, Beijing, China (2016).
  • Walisadeera, A.I., Wikramanayake, G.N., and Ginige, A. Designing a Farmer Centred Ontology for Social Life Network. In: 2nd International Conference on Data Management Technologies and Applications (DATA 2013), Reykjavík, Iceland, 29-21 July 2013, pp. 238-247.
  • Walisadeera, A.I., Ginige, A., and Wikramanayake, G.N. User Centered Ontology for Sri Lankan Agriculture Domain, In: 14th International Conference on Advances in ICT for Emerging Regions (ICTer 2014), Colombo, Sri Lanka: 10 – 13 December 2014, pp. 149-155.
  • Athula Ginige, Anusha Indika Walisadeera, Tamara Ginige, Lasanthi De Silva, Pasquale Di Giovanni, Maneesh Mathai, Jeevani Goonetillake, Gihan Wikramanayake, Giuliana Vitiello, Monica Sebillo, Genoveffa Tortora, Deborah Richards, Ramesh Jain. Digital Knowledge Ecosystem for achieving Sustainable Agriculture Production: A Case Study from Sri Lanka. In: 3rd IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (IEEE DSAA 2016), Montreal, Canada: October 17-19 2016, pp. 602-611.
  • S.I. Wilson, J.S. Goonetillake, Athula Ginige, W.A. Indika, 2021, Analysis of information quality for a usable information system in agriculture domain: a study in the Sri Lankan context, In the Journal of Procedia Computer Science, Volume 184, Pages 346-355, Elsevier, ISSN 1877-0509.
  • Janagan Sivagnanasundaram, Jeevani Goonetillake,Rifana Buhary, Thushara Dharmawardhana, Renuka Weerakkody, Rukmali Gunapala and Athula Ginige, 2021, Digitally-Enabled Crop Disorder Management Process Based on Farmer Empowerment for Improved Outcomes: A Case Study from Sri Lanka, In the International Journal of Sustainability, Volume 13(14), 7823; MDPI Publishers, EISSN 2071-1050, https://doi.org/10.3390/su13147823.
  • Sivagnanasundaram J., Ginige A., Goonetillake J. (2018) Event Detection over Continuous Data Stream for the Sustainable Growth in Agriculture Context. In: Gervasi O. et al. (eds) Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2018. ICCSA 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 10960. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95162-1_39.
  • Janagan Sivagnanasundaram, Athula Ginige, Jeevani Goonetillake, 2019, Farmers as Sensors: A Crowdsensing Platform to Generate Agricultural Pest Incidence Reports, In Proceedings of the International Conference on Internet of Things Research and Practice (iCIOTRP), pg: 13-18, IEEE.
  • Sivagnanasundaram, J., Ginige, A., Goonetillake, J., 2019, Achieving Agriculture Biotic Sustainability through Mobile-based Information System: Adapting the characteristics of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), In Proceedings of the 30th Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS). Melbourne, Australia.
  • RSI Wilson, Athula Ginige, Jeevani S Goonetillake, WA Indika, 2019, User Needs-driven Enrichment of Ontology: A case study in Sri Lankan Agriculture, In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Information Technology: IoT and Smart City, pg: 581-586.