A Prototype Expert Reference Advisory System for Ethioplan Studies
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Date
1996-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Reference serves exist to maximise access to information contained in information
centralization. Yet human expense have not achieved this goal as they desired. But the
development of the expen system technology the possibilities, have become promising.
Demonstration of how the expen system technology could be used in enhancing the
reference services for the domain, Ethiopian Studies, in general and for Ethiopian
History in particular is the main theme of this thesis.For this purpose a prototype expen reference advisory system was developed following
the prototyping approach using the Knowledge Pro Windows version 2.0 shell. The
interview, protocol analysis and observation methods for acquiring knowledge from the
reference librarians: production rules for representing the acquired knowledge; backward
chaining for conferencing mechanism; and graphics and hypertext technology for designing
the user interface were employed. In addition to facts about a user's inquiry to be input to the system by the user, the
system has an interface with the database program from where facts about the possible
sources are retrieved during the system's inference. The system provides the user with
possible sources of information or advice as well as an explanation how it reaches to its
conclusion and why it asks the user to input some facts. Even though, production rules are not suitable for representing individual users model.
overall they are found to be fining for modelling the knowledge of the reference experts
in the domain. Besides the interfaces features. for both user and other systems, are found
to be quite satisfactory. It sounds to be feasible to develop a working system based on this prototype that could
be used both by the end-user and the reference librarians who are interested in the
domain. Moreover, the models. tools and approaches that are used in this study could be
used for other related domains
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Keywords
Information Science