Role of Expert System in Natural Resources Management
Rajkishore Prasad
Lecturer, University Department of Electronics,
B.R.A.Bihar University Muzaffarpur.
Email: rkishore2k@hotmail.com
Dr. Ashok Kumar Sinha
Professor 0f Electronics & Instrumentation,
Galgotia College of Engineering Greater Noida(U.P),India
Email: aksinha_1@yahoo.com
1. Introduction:
The modern era of science and technology s is the era of expert skill.
Everywhere in every domain relevant expertise is needed. The major problems in
accessing a human expert in a particular field are unavailability and scarcity of real
experts and if the human expert is available then there may be problem for common
people in making contact with him. Consultation may be very expensive and human
expert may feel the repetitive job uninteresting. This in turn may affect expert’s
efficiency. The other major problems that are being faced by the human expert are the
limitation of his memory and processing inability of all the essential knowledge required
in the process of decision-making. As a result of researches and developments, day by
day, new knowledge in enormous amount is being added in every discipline and thus
more relevant and accurate advice can be taken from a human expert if his own
knowledge is updated which is not an easy task. Human experts are bounded by
limitations and it is quite difficult for a human expert to consider all the essential factors
while taking decision. Something is always escaped and remains unattended. Thus some
tool or assistance is needed even for an expert to update his knowledge and get help in
decision making process. In the researches and developments in science and technology,
attempts have been always made to overcome the problems of people. The advancements
made in the discipline of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science and Eng. have
tackled the problems related to mental and intellectual processes of the people. Gradual
advancements in these disciplines have enhanced our cognitive capabilities. From very
beginning scientists and researchers of AI have been trying to produce systems that can
behave like an intelligent being. In course of such developments scientists, researchers
and other related resource persons realized the clue of human expertise in a particular
field and tried to encode and assimilate the knowledge and experience of human experts
in computer that led to the notion of development of expert systems in different domains.
An expert system is a computer-based program that uses knowledge, facts and different
reasoning techniques to solve problems that normally require the abilities of human
experts. The program asks series of questions about the concerned problem and gives
appropriate advice based on its store of knowledge. The knowledge, the expert system
uses is made up of either rules or experience information about the behavior of elements
of a particular subject domain. Such systems can be designed for specific hardware and
software configurations, or they can be software systems that are designed to run on a
general-purpose computer. Expert systems of today support many problem solving
activities such as decision making, knowledge fusing, designing, and planning, forecasting, regulating, controlling, monitoring, identifying, diagnosing, prescribing,
interpreting, explaining, training etc. using different techniques and it is expected that
future expert systems will support even more activities. In the beginning, expert systems
were developed in the chemical and scientific domains and by the end of 1970s expert
systems were operating in the medicine, chemical, education, natural resources and
science domains. Expert system started to gain popularity in the early 1980s. The
announcement of successful operational systems like PROSPECTOR [1,2] a natural
resources system that evaluates geographic sites for potential mineral deposits of
commercial interest, MYCIN , medical consulting system, etc. catalysed the expert
system technology. The availability of powerful tools to develop expert system have
made possible creation of large number of expert systems in different domains. With the
increasing interest in expert systems and availability of more powerful tools many more
expert systems are being developed for new domains. The knowledge engineers are
trying to use better knowledge representation and control strategies to develop more
powerful expert systems. Today the most important applications of expert systems are
those in which expert systems access databases used for other purpose or linked to other
types of software and systems. Many valuable applications in future will combine
conventional data processing with expert system technology. The linkage of expert
systems with database management systems, management information systems, decision
support systems, process control, office automation, geographical information system
will tend to take place due to combination of knowledge engineering and information
engineering [3].
This paper presents essentials of design and development technology of
expert system and their application in the natural resource database management to
facilitate the remote sensing applications.