The ES knowledge was compiled from the university and college regulations, the long term experience of the author as an academic advisor and the Deputy Dean of the College of IT, and discussing the knowledge with students and advisors for their feedback. Kappa-PC supports OO modeling which is adopted in this system since OO database allows each student and each course to be modeled as a single object. The system is developed using Kappa-PC expert system shell. The following sections explain the details of the developed ES by explaining its components. The ES can explain its results by tracing the If- Then rules used to reach the conclusions through a component called the explanation subsystem. The proposed system in this research (IS- Advisor) is modeled as an ES with an object-oriented database, thus the main components of IS-Advisor are: The OO database, the rule-based knowledge base, the inference engine, and the user interface. Academic advising process can be successfully modeled in computers as a rule-based expert system since most advising regulations are based on academic 'rules' such as "if you pass course A, then you can register course B" and so on. A rule based ES captu res h uman knowledge using If-The n rules in a rule-based knowledge base. Regarding the domain of academic advising, ES technology seems to be the most successful method of computerization because the dialogue between human advisor and the student can be conveniently emulated by the dialogue betw een the ES and the student, and the reasoning of the academic advisor can be successfully automated by the reasoning power of ES particularly the rule-based ES. "Expert Systems (ES) are programs that attempt to emulate the behavior of human experts, usually confined to a specific field". Another particul ar featu re of IS-Adv isor is the Objec t-Oriented (OO) architecture of its database as will be addressed in subsequent sections. Thus, the ES developed in this research is unique in its specific knowledge base and reasoning strategies and is intended to be of great help to the department of IS. The proposed ES (IS-Advisor) represents such specific advising knowledge and reasoning as rules in its knowledge base co mponent and re asoning st rategies in its i nference e ngine component. However, the accumulated advising experience and grade statistics related to the IS department show that students who can be advised to register six courses without difficulty are students with AGPA 3.00 or above (out of 4.00), whereas students with AGPA greater than 2.00 and less than 2.25 are better ad vised to registe r 4 courses only the next semes ter to give them a chance to increase their AGPA. As an example to illustrate this concept, AUST regulations allow each student to register from three to six courses per semester. There can never be a 'global' expert student advising system applicable to all academic institutions and departments because of the existence of academic regulations and expert advising knowledge and reasoning specific to each academic unit. Literature reveals many endeavors in the field of automating academic advising activities including the application of expert systems. The system is called "IS-Advisor" and helps students in course selection for each academic semester. The objective of this research is to develop a prototype rule based Expert Syste m (ES) for the academic advising of the students of the Information Systems (IS) Department, College of Information Technology, Ajman University of Science and Technology (AUST), UAE. This hopefully will save valuable time for academic advisors and for students. Utilizing a computerized advising system, students can save the software consultation results and can then meet with the human advisor for further consultation (if there is still a need for the traditional face-to-face meeting). Since student advising is a time-consuming effort, there is a need for computerization of some parts of the advising process. Advising meetings are usually held during the beginning of each academic semester. Traditionally a university student plans the courses semester-by-semester towards a degree through lengthy meetings with the human academic advisor. Student academic advising is an essential task in educational institutions.
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