SyrAgri: A Recommender System for Agriculture in Mali

Abstract

This paper focuses on recommender system for agriculture in Mali called SyrAgri. The goal is to guide and improve the quality-of-experience of farmers by offering them good farming practices according to their needs. Two types of recommendations are essentially taken into account: the recommendation of crops and the recommendation of farming practices based on some predefined criteria which are: yield, life cycle of the crop, type of soil, growing season, etc. SyrAgri also informs farmers about crop rotation and the similarity between different types of crops based on the following parameters: crop families, growing seasons and appropriate soil types. For the development of this system a hybrid recommendation approach was used: demographic, semantic and collaborative methods. Each method is adapted to a specific stage of a user’s visit to the system. The demographic approach is first activated in order to offer recommendations to new users of the system, which resolves the concept of cold start (immediate inclusion of a new item or a new user in the system). The semantic approach is then activated to recommend to the user items (crops, agricultural practices) semantically close to those (s)he has appreciated. Finally, the collaborative approach is used to recommend items that similar users have liked.