ET: an Enrolment Tool to Generate Expert Systems for University Courses

Expert Systems are in use today in many fields where there exists a well-defined problem domain (Giarratano & Riley, 2005). In this chapter, XML is used to help define a knowledge domain for academic course rules and used as the starting point for web-base expert systems. Requirements for the satisfactory completion of university and college courses can be quite complex. Courses such as undergraduate bachelor degrees and postgraduate masters degrees are typically composed of units (sometimes called subjects) that must be completed according to the course rules. Such rules may impose constraints on the units that may be taken from specific groups of units, as well as constraints like prerequisite units and corequisite units. Many universities designate a human expert – the Course Coordinator, to guide students through their enrolment process to ensure that students' programs conform to course rules. In addition, many universities provide web-based descriptions of courses and units. However, such web sites are usually purely descriptive and lack a level of interaction with students that would enable answers to complex enrolment questions. It is therefore tempting to consider the automation of the course coordinator's role and its delivery. This chapter will provide a detailed description of the generation of a variety of expert system products intended to provide online advice to students about university bachelor and masters level courses. These products include course rules, unit descriptions, enrolment advice and course planners. They are designed following knowledge acquisition from experienced academic course coordinators about typical student queries in relation to their enrolment choices. An XML Document Type Definition (DTD) will be described for university and college courses. It will be compatible with the European Credit Transfer System (EU, 2004), thus allowing a course to be composed of units with set credit points, term or semester of offering, and other unit constraints. Course rules may be expressed in terms of credit point requirements from groups of units. The XML data definition is sufficient to express the typical course requirement rules of higher education institutions such as universities and colleges

Relevance feedback and query expansion for searching the web: a model for searching a digital library

A fully operational large scale digital library is likely to be based on a distributed architecture and because of this it is likely that a number of independent search engines may be used to index different overlapping portions of the entire contents of the library. In any case, different media, text, audio, image, etc., will be indexed for retrieval by different search engines so techniques which provide a coherent and unified search over a suite of underlying independent search engines are thus likely to be an important part of navigating in a digital library. In this paper we present an architecture and a system for searching the world's largest DL, the world wide web. What makes our system novel is that we use a suite of underlying web search engines to do the bulk of the work while our system orchestrates them in a parallel fashion to provide a higher level of information retrieval functionality. Thus it is our meta search engine and not the underlying direct search engines that provide the relevance feedback and query expansion options for the user. The paper presents the design and architecture of the system which has been implemented, describes an initial version which has been operational for almost a year, and outlines the operation of the advanced version

Enhancing home based care for HIV patients using an advisory expert system

South Africa has one of the highest Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) prevalence rates in the world. People living with HIV/AIDS experience many unrelieved symptoms. Nutritional care and support are important in preventing development of nutritional deficiencies. Home remedies can extend and improve the quality of their lives. Home remedies treatment involves eating healthy food, avoiding certain types of foods, psychological and emotional support and practicing hygiene to avoid skin infections (Sizani, Bandile; Nikiwe 2012). HIV/AIDS treatment and management strategies require ongoing management and support. In this research, we work with people from a clinic in Gugulethu Township in Western Cape, South Africa. The area has high prevalence of HIV (Ministry of health South Africa 2011). Most of the HIV patients in this area access medical information by walking long distances to the clinic. Most of these patients are poor and sometimes cannot afford to visit the clinic regularly for medical advice. In this township there is scarcity of health care workers (HCWs). The HCWs toil on many fronts to meet the enormous demand for the HIV/AIDS services but they are not able to meet the patients' needs. The aim of this research is to empower HIV-patients to self-manage the HIV-related symptoms which they experience. We investigated the way in which the HCWs deliver information to the patients. We interviewed the patients to understand what measures they take to manage the symptoms which they experienced. Consequently, we developed an advisory expert system to enhance Home-Based Care for HIV patients. An advisory expert system is defined as a computing system which is capable of representing and reasoning about some knowledge–rich domain, with a view to solving problems and giving advice (Gustafson et al. 1994). Since South Africa has high mobile phone penetration and most of the patients own them, we opted to use mobile phone as a tool to access the information provided by the advisory expert system. The system was then deployed at the clinic. We trained both HCWs and patients how to use the system. The findings were captured and reported after a six month deployment of the system. The results show that our system can be used as an effective tool to disseminate nutritional and psychological support information to HIV- patients in Gugulethu. The system is simple, yet practical. It helps the patients to self-manage the HIV-related symptoms which they experienced and at the same time, saves time and cost for both HCWs and the patients

Explorations of knowledge management in a defence engineering environment

This thesis originates from first hand early experiences of the researcher regarding current processes and practices in operation in BAE SYSTEMS Ltd (now referred to hereafter as `the Company'), and recognises the potential for improvement within the realm of knowledge management. The huge volume of internal and external information overwhelms the majority of organisations and knowledge management provides solutions to enable organisations to be effective, efficient, and competitive. The software agent approach and information retrieval technique indicates great potential for effectively managing information. This research seeks to answer the questions of whether software agents can provide the Company with solutions to the knowledge management issues identified in this inquiry and whether they can also be used elsewhere within the organisation to improve other aspects of the business. The research analysis shows that software agents offer a wide applicability across the Company; can be created with relative ease and can provide benefits by improving the effectiveness and efficiency of processes. Findings also provided valuable insight into human-computer-interface design and usability aspects of software agent applications. The research deals with these questions using action research in order to develop a collaborative change mechanism within the Company and a practical applicability of the research findings in situ. Using a pluralistic methodology the findings provide a combination of the subjective and objective views intermittently within the research cycles thereby giving the researchera more holistic view of this research. Little attention has been paid to integrating software agent technologies into the knowledge management processes.This research proposes a software agent application that incorporates: (1) Co-ordination of software agents for information retrieval to manage information gathering, filtering, and dissemination; (2) To promote effective interpretation of information and more efficient processes;(3) Building accurate search profiles weighted on pre-defined criteria; (4) Integrating and organising a Company resource management knowledge-base; (5) Ensuring that the right information gets to the right personnel at the right time; and (6) So the Company can effectively assign the right experts to the right roles within the Company

Development of a network-integrated feature-driven engineering environment

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Impact of knowledge management and inter-organizational system on supply chain performance : the case of Australian agri-food industry

Motivated by the problems of cost competitiveness, profitability and market development issues in the Australian agri-food industry, this study was designed to addresses research questions as to how levels of knowledge asset management, inter-organizational systems (IOS) and relationship structures impact on the performance of a supply chain and differentiate the performance of the industry. Supply chains in the Australian agri-food industry have been based mainly on market arrangements with operation production pushed and, often, adversarial, resulting in profitability problems and a lack of innovative actions in developing products and a business based on insights from customers.With the main objective of investigating sources of supply chain performance in the Australian agri-food industry, five specific objectives were investigated. The preliminary conceptual model were developed principally using supply chain management and marketing literature in agribusiness and concepts from resource-based view (RBV), knowledge-based view (KBV) and transaction cost economics (TCE). The study objectives were addressed by a mixed method research methodology through a pragmatist approach that involved a first phase of qualitative data collection to enhance the theoretical model and develop survey instruments, followed by a second phase of quantitative data collection and analysis to test the research hypotheses.The qualitative first phase was based on in-depth interviews with eight agri-food firms to explore the research questions in real-world conditions. Content analysis of the interview transcripts helped identifying important factors and variables related to the performance of the supply chain which, later, were aligned with the literature and enhanced the initial theoretical research model and hypothesized relationships. The second phase involved finalizing the research model that used 22 hypotheses targeting factors of supply chain performance in the specific agri-food industry; viz., the Australian beef industry. A questionnaire was developed and pretested, followed by a pilot study of 68 participants. Finally, data were collected through a random telephone survey of 315 firms including input suppliers, producers, processors and retailers in the beef industries of Western Australia and Queensland. The data were analyzed using partial least square (PLS) based structural equation modelling (SEM).Assessment of the research model demonstrated that 18 of the 22 hypotheses, made up of 11 primary factors and 15 sub-factors, were supported. Results indicated that, among the predictive factors, knowledge asset management was the strongest predictor of supply chain performance, followed by negotiation power, price uncertainty, inter-firm relationship strength and environmental management practices. Competition intensity, vertical coordination and transaction climate were significant antecedents of knowledge asset management, IOS use and inter-firm relationship strength in the Australian context. Results established that relationship strength in the supply chain depends on the level of commitment, mutual investments, trust and interdependence of the firms. The non-significant relationship between IOS and supply chain performance indicated that IOS, by itself, cannot produce sustained performance advantages unless pre-existing complementary human and business resources are exploited in an integrated way. Finally, statistical evidence proved that the supply chain is a source of competitiveness in the industry and that competitive advantage lies in system efficiencies in the performance of the supply chain.Finally, the study provides frameworks for developing the strategies of inter-firm relationships, knowledge asset management and the use of electronic systems in the supply chain to align the best principles of value-creating strategy in firms and in the industry, for competitive advantage. Thus, the results have provided a comprehensive, reliable and valid model of supply chain performance that contributes to knowledge at the strategic level for appropriate planning and benchmarking to improve performance of the agri-food industry. Finally, although the hypothesized relationships in the model have been tested in the beef industry in Australia, the issues can be examined not only in other sectors of the Australian agri-food industry supply chain but also in other agricultural sectors within Australia and overseas

Explorations of knowledge management in a defence engineering environment

This thesis originates from first hand early experiences of the researcher regarding current processes and practices in operation in BAE SYSTEMS Ltd (now referred to hereafter as `the Company'), and recognises the potential for improvement within the realm of knowledge management. The huge volume of internal and external information overwhelms the majority of organisations and knowledge management provides solutions to enable organisations to be effective, efficient, and competitive. The software agent approach and information retrieval technique indicates great potential for effectively managing information. This research seeks to answer the questions of whether software agents can provide the Company with solutions to the knowledge management issues identified in this inquiry and whether they can also be used elsewhere within the organisation to improve other aspects of the business. The research analysis shows that software agents offer a wide applicability across the Company; can be created with relative ease and can provide benefits by improving the effectiveness and efficiency of processes. Findings also provided valuable insight into human-computer-interface design and usability aspects of software agent applications. The research deals with these questions using action research in order to develop a collaborative change mechanism within the Company and a practical applicability of the research findings in situ. Using a pluralistic methodology the findings provide a combination of the subjective and objective views intermittently within the research cycles thereby giving the researchera more holistic view of this research. Little attention has been paid to integrating software agent technologies into the knowledge management processes.This research proposes a software agent application that incorporates: (1) Co-ordination of software agents for information retrieval to manage information gathering, filtering, and dissemination; (2) To promote effective interpretation of information and more efficient processes;(3) Building accurate search profiles weighted on pre-defined criteria; (4) Integrating and organising a Company resource management knowledge-base; (5) Ensuring that the right information gets to the right personnel at the right time; and (6) So the Company can effectively assign the right experts to the right roles within the Company.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo