Ontology-Based Decision Support for Young Agripreneurs in Organic Agriculture Using Semantic Web Rule Language

The rapid growth of organic agriculture has created both opportunities and challenges for young agripreneurs, who should navigate certification standards (e.g., Thai Organic and the European Union Organic), compliance requirements, and market-specific documentation for domestic and international trade.This study aims to design and implement an ontology-driven decision support system (DSS) that leverages Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) to provide transparent and context-specific recommendations for organic farming.Having adopted a design-and-development approach, the research collected data from 50 agripreneurs and integrated these insights into an ontology framework enriched with rule-based reasoning.Five structured sets of recommendation rules were developed to link organic products, target markets, certification standards, certifying agencies, certification services, and required supporting documents while their performance was evaluated using standard information retrieval metrics.Evaluation based on case-based rule validation indicated that the system returned no false positives across the tested scenarios (100% precision), with an average recall of 93.03% and an overall Fmeasure of 96.39%, thus demonstrating strong logical correctness and practical applicability within the defined evaluation scope.The study concluded that embedding SWRL-based "IF-THEN" recommendation rules within ontological structures could effectively bridge fragmented regulatory and market knowledge and actionable decision making, in order to offer agripreneurs a scalable and explainable tool to manage certification and market access.The significance of this work lies in its dual contributions: theoretically, it demonstrates how semantic technologies could advance knowledge-to-decision processes in agriculture; practically, it provides structured guidance to support certification compliance and market participation in organic farming.