A VIEW ON THE WEB ENGINEERING NATURE OF WEB BASED EXPERT SYSTEMS

Abstract: The Web has become the ubiquitous platform for distributing information and computer services. The tough Web competition, the way people and organizations rely on Web applications, and the increasing user requirements for better services have raised their complexity. Expert systems can be accessed via the Web, forming a set of Web applications known as Web based expert systems. This paper supports that the Web engineering and expert systems principals should be combined when developing Web based expert systems. A development process model will be presented that illustrates, in brief, how these principals can be combined. Based on this model, a publicly available Web based expert system called Landfill Operation Management Advisor (LOMA) was developed. In addition, the results of an accessibility evaluation on LOMA – the first ever reported on Web based expert systems – will be presented. Based on this evaluation some thoughts on accessibility guidelines specific to Web based expert systems will be reported.