ET: an Enrolment Tool to Generate Expert Systems for University Courses
Neil Dunstan · Expert Systems · 2010
A prototype ET was used to describe the method in (Dunstan, 2008) for generating domainspecific web-based expert systems. That method used Open Source products Linux (Moody, 2001), Perl (Wall & Schwartz, 1992) and SWI-Prolog (Wielemaker, 2003) and a domainspecific XML parser to generate a web-based expert system. The prototype produced a single web page with limited functionality and used low-level parsing techniques. A recommender system that matches student interests with elective units was proposed in (O'Mahony & Smyth, 2007) and decision support for enrolment at the institutional level is described in (Maltz et al., 2007). Current generation university and college web sites provide only minimal online support for the complex task of guiding student enrolment. Web services typically only provide tables of rules and unit descriptions. ET produces expert systems with a web-based user interface. An overview of requirements for expert systems on the internet is described in (Grzenda & Noemczak, 2004) and (Caldwell et al., 2003) compares two possible architectures. There have been many approaches to building web-based expert systems (Li et al., 2002; Li, 2005; Huntington, 2000; Riva et al., 1998). They propose solutions in isolation. The approach of the ET project features an XML DTD and takes advantage of the growing synergy of XML and Web technologies. Many browsers include XML parsers and are able to display raw XML files in a tree fashion at least, or use style guides to present XML data. Web-based applications can request XML data files from remote servers for processing and presentation. The XML DTD provides a vocabulary, namespace and data file structure for Web and XML applications that use academic course rule data.