A Knowledge Acquisition System for a university educational process

The cost of information management and manpower involvement in administrative operations is increasing rapidly with the rise in amount of transactions. In order to counteract the above issue, all the tasks involved in administrative operations should be automated. Integrating a knowledge based support to this automation would be a novel approach. For storing and deploying the task automation knowledge, the present research describes a Knowledge-Acquisition System (KAS) to store the process oriented knowledge to be used by a typical knowledge based system called as knowledge based educational administrative system (KBEADS). This knowledge based system provides the necessary support to the administrative staff of a large engineering institution to carry out their knowledge intensive academic operations such as optimization of student graduation path. The KAS permits advisors to specify rules on the more substantive advising issues. The system permits the university students to obtain an optimized selection of courses without the assistance of a human advisor. The knowledge base consisting of rules and facts has been implemented using Java Expert System Shell version 71p2. In this paper, we describe the system structure, facility, user interface, and some experience with the system.