A Consulting System for Estimating Costs of an Information Technology Hardware Project based on Law of Public Investment

Ontology is an effective approach for representing practical knowledge domains. The cost estimating for an information technology (IT) hardware project is an important problem. It affects government decision for investment. The cost estimating must to be conformed the law on public investment. In this paper, we present a support system to plan an IT hardware project based on law of public investment. Knowledge base of this system is built based on ontology approach. It includes concepts about expenses in a project, rules for computing expenses, law documents about cost estimation in the IT field. This supporting system combines a inference engine to make the estimation results more accuracy. Our system has been tested on the real problems of public investment projects on hardware infrastructure in the field of IT in Tien Giang province, Vietnam.