Maize AGRIdaksh: A Farmer Friendly Device

With the growing population and high farmer to extension worker ratio, there is a great need for an intuitive knowledge based system, which may suggest suitable solutions to the farmers. Expert system on maize attempts to capture the knowledge of human experts and make it available through computer programme. Maize expert system has four essential components i.e. the knowledge acquisition module, the knowledge base, the inference engine and the explanatory interface. The knowledge acquisition module consists of gathering of knowledge from the panel of experts of different field of maize e.g. varieties, insects, diseases, etc. It also stores the facts from textbooks, technical /extension /research bulletins. A knowledge engineer further processes it through programming and refinements. The inference engine is the heart of an expert system. It processes the input i.e. the problem statement. The explanatory interface allows the user to get the results in Hypertext markup language, Java script and Cascaded style sheets. This system also explains the procedure to be followed by users to get answers of queries related to maize. Thus it is very useful tool for dissemination/ accessing relevant information related to maize across the globe.