Developing Domain Ontology for Nigerian History

Background: Nigeria, which is the most populous country in Africa, located in the West of Africa has a rich political and cultural history. Although, Nigeria has a valid history, the documentation of a significant portion of the historical information is vague and anecdotal because a lot of it is oral, which makes it susceptible to distortion. There is also poor electronic documentation, with a large chunk of history captured in print - history books, media report and museum artifacts. Objective: To develop a domain ontology for Nigerian history which is intended to provide viable support for sundry automation needs that require historical knowledge. Results: The NHO (Nigerian History Ontology) has been developed using a semi- automated approach that involved extraction of terms from textual sources and eventual conceptualization, modeling, and development using the Protégé Ontology Editor. The NHO (Nigerian History Ontology) developed ontology reveals a potential to competently support knowledge-based software endeavor. Also compared with Gold Standard ontology, it was found to be rich in content. Conclusion: We have presented the details of the process of developing a domain ontology for Nigeria history, which is the first of its kind in terms of focus (Nigeria), and perspectives (political, cultural). The NHO is a documentation of Nigerian historical knowledge for meaningful use, which makes the knowledge useful by both humans and software agents. It also provides an electronic archive of Nigerian history in a compact and easily accessible way

Semantic Association Rule Mining in Text using Domain Ontology

Online news websites are now valuable archives for both current and old news regarding various issues, particularly those that relate to the political and historical contexts of a country. These news platforms have become an important medium for all forms of political activities such as branding, campaigns, and communication. Online newspapers make large volume of textual data available, which are rich in political and historical inferences that can be leveraged for national development. In this paper we report a procedure for ontology-based association rule mining for knowledge extraction from text. Ordinarily, association rule mining algorithms have the limitations of generating many non-interesting rules, huge number of discovered rules, and low algorithm performance. This research demonstrates a procedure for improving the performance of association rule mining in text mining by using domain ontology. To do this, a study context of Nigerian politics based on information extracted from a Nigerian online newspaper was selected, and a methodology that combined natural language processing methods, ontology-based keywords extraction, and the modified Generating Association Rules based on Weighting scheme (GARW) was applied. The result obtained from the study revealed that compared to non-ontology based association rule mining approaches, our procedure provides significant rule reduction in the number of generated rules, and produced rules which are more semantically related to the problem context. The study validates the capability of domain ontology to improve the performance of association rule mining algorithms, particularly when dealing with unstructured textual data

DEVELOPING AN INTERACTIVE STUDENT RECRUITMENT PORTAL FOR UNIVERSITY-INDUSTRY COOPERATION IN NIGERIA

Institutions of higher learning provide the pool of professional expertise that the industry thrives on. Therefore, there is the need to facilitate a platform that will provide students a ready access to available vacancies in the industry. This platform will also facilitate the recruitment of the most qualified candidate for vacant positions. This paper reports the design and implementation of a webbased interactive portal for students' recruitment. The system enables cooperate organisations in Nigeria to publicly advertise their vacancies for interested students to apply online. Based on different job requirements, the system facilitates on-line assessment and selection of the most qualified candidates for job and internship placements. A preliminary evaluation of the interactive recruitment portal reveals that its features are standard and suitable for viable university-industry cooperation

Family Planning Perceptions and Sustainable Development in Nigeria

There have been concerns on the galloping population growth and its effects on human beings. The world’s population is increasing and now approximately eight billion people with high potential for further increase. Increasing population growth has significant social and economic implications at the individual, family, and societal levels. Family planning seems to be the potent cornerstone of a worldwide strategy to slow down population growth. However, in developing countries, the perception of the core population is not clear considering the hyper fertility rate in these countries. This study, a household survey, sampled 424 married women, and conducted five in-depth interviews, to examine the relationship between family planning perceptions and high fertility rate among married women in Nigeria. Data collected were analysed using percentages for univariate analysis and chi square to test relationships between the variables. The results revealed that 95.5% of the respondents had heard about family planning while 53.3% stated that they had never used it. A greater percentage of them admitted that they refused to adopt family planning for fear of side effects. About 51% of them stated that money was a barrier to the adoption of family planning while 35% of the respondents claimed that their religion did not support it. Linear regression results revealed that significant relationships existed between the family perceptions (p < 0.013), and sustainable development variables. Family planning was seen as an important preventive measure against infant and maternal mortality. The study concluded that culture, socio-economic factors and poor knowledge about family planning were major determinants of perceptions about family planning, and the utilisation. The study recommended increased family planning talks during clinical meetings with mothers, and empowerment of women in decision making about family planning within households

Implementation of an Intelligent Course Advisory Expert System

Academic advising of students is an expert task that requires a lot of time, and intellectual investments from the human agent saddled with such a responsibility. In addition, good quality academic advising is subject to availability of experienced and committed personnel to undertake the task. However, there are instances when there is paucity of capable human adviser, or where qualified persons are not readily available because of other pressing commitments, which will make system-based decision support desirable, and useful. In this work, we present the design, implementation, of an intelligent Course Advisory Expert System (CAES) that uses a combination of rule based reasoning (RBR), and case based reasoning (CBR) to recommend courses that a student should register in a specific semester by making recommendation based on the student’s academic history. The evaluation CAES yielded satisfactory performance in terms of credibility of its recommendations, and usability

Using Ontology-based Information Extraction for Subject-based Auto-grading

The procedure for the grading of students’ essays in subject-based examinations is quite challenging particularly when dealing with large number of students. Hence, several automatic essay-grading systems have been designed to alleviate the demands of manual subject grading. However, relatively few of the existing systems are able to give informative feedbacks that are based on elaborate domain knowledge to students, particularly in subject-based automatic grading where domain knowledge is a major factor. In this work, we discuss the vision of subject-based automatic essay scoring system that leverages on semiautomatic creation of subject ontology, uses ontology-based information extraction approach to enable automatic essay scoring, and gives informative feedback to students

Heuristic Evaluation of an Institutional E-learning System: A Nigerian Case.

Many African academic institutions have adopted the use of elearning systems, since they enable students to learn at their own pace, time, and without restriction to the classroom. However, evidence of usability evaluation of e-learning systems in Africa is mostly lacking in the literature. This paper reports the experimental heuristic evaluation of the e-learning system of a Nigerian University. The objective is to demonstrate the application of expertbased usability evaluation techniques such as Heuristic evaluation for assessing the attributes of existing e-learning systems. The study revealed that while the e-learning system has strong credentials in terms of support for Web 2.0 activities, good learning content and boasts of useful e-learning features, improvements are necessary in other areas such as interactive learning, assessment and feedback, and quality of learning content. The study adds to the body of extant knowledge in the area of usability evaluation of e-learning systems in African institution

ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECT OF CLASS ATTENDANCE ON STUDENTS'ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE USING ASSOCIATION RULE MINING TECHNIQUE

Many institutions of learning encourage students to have good lecture attendance records. The belief is that an above average attendance rate will enhance students’ academic performance. However, very few studies have attempted to answer questions that relate to: i) the actual impact of good attendance record on students' academic performance; ii) the extent, in quantitative terms, of the effect of good attendance record on students’ academic performance. This paper reports the findings from an experimental analysis of students’ attendance record and corresponding academic performance results using Association Rule Mining. Over the years, Association Rule Mining has proved to be effective in analysing relationship between variables in transactional databases. The result of the case study provides useful information for the managements of higher institutions of learning on appropriate perspective to adopt on class attendance policies

From Job Satisfaction to Organizational Commitment: The Mediating Influence of Perceived Treatment of Diversity among Nigeria’s Public Healthcare Employees

BACKGROUND: In the Nigerian, like most developing economies’, health sector, employees’ perceptions about treatments of diversity are crucial not only to their satisfaction with the job but equally to their commitment to the organisation. The importance of this view of the public health sector, is that it could induce political behaviours, result in conflict situations and hence promote tensed work environments, if not properly managed. Despite these facts, there is again, a dearth of existing literature that shows an element of empirical analysis to demonstrate the moderating influence of workforce diversity on job satisfaction and organisational commitment of public healthcare employees in Nigeria. AIM: This study is focused on investigating the mediating effect of employees’ perceived treatments of diversity in the workplace on the relationship between job satisfaction and their commitment to the organisation. METHODS: The survey method was used to collect data. One hundred thirty-three public health workers from the Lagos State Health Ministry in Nigeria were involved in this research. The research used questionnaires as the main tools to perform this research. The statistics on the reliability of the tools used in this study were 0.747. The statistical analysis was carried out using SPSS (version 22) and AMOS (version 23) software for this study. RESULTS: The results from the statistical analysis indicate that job satisfaction significantly relates with all dimensions of workforce diversity in the following ways: education (r = 0.19), gender (r = 0.48), religion (r = -0.20), ethnicity (r = 0.42) and position (r = 0.15). The mediating effects of workforce diversity on the relationship between job satisfaction and employee commitment is also evident from the statistical analysis, especially with respect to education (affective commitment = 0.16, normative commitment = 0.18, continuance commitment = 0.18); gender (affective commitment = 0.32, normative commitment = 0.42); and religion (continuance commitment = 0.14). CONCLUSION: This study concluded that not only is job satisfaction significant to ensuring the commitment of healthcare workers to their organisation, but more critical is the role of workforce diversity as viable leverage for transiting the interest of employees from the level of job satisfaction to organisational commitment

Improving Rural Healthcare Delivery in Nigeria using Distributed Expert System Technology

Provision of adequate healthcare for the citizens is the responsibility of governments. This involves recruiting qualified medical personnel, and providing quality medical services nationwide. Theratio of medical doctorsto patients in Nigeria is 1:6,800, which means the citizens are grossly underserved in terms of medical services. Hence, there is need for new strategies that will ensure that more citizens access healthcare services, particularly people in the rural areas. In this paper, a framework for an SMS based expert system for rural healthcare delivery is proposed, which takes advantage of the wide coverage of telephony services in the rural areas in Nigeria. A preliminary evaluation of the expert system for pulmonary heart disease that was developed reveals that it emulates human expert capability at a reasonable level. This makes it suitable for deployment on a national scale to cater for the shortage of medical practitioners particularly in the rural area