An Intelligent Information System for Groundwater Resources Categorization and Assessment

This paper aims to present an intelligent information system developed for groundwater categorization and classification. The developed system integrates more than one research field and tools, including Decision Support Systems (DSS), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), knowledge base and modeling and visualization enhancement. Visual Basic (VB) environment is used as an inference engine for this system and the code is written using VBA. The system aims to categorize water resources according to the international water quality criteria (FAO, USSL, Gupta and Roades) and to reclassify water resources according to a developed decision matrix from the application of the expert system. A user friendly interface (GUI) is developed to help the user to manage the system and to link different system environments. The system is linked through the GUI with a GIS to display the water resources layers and to provide functions to query and display the spatial locations and associated attributes. The system is used to make a decision about the suitability of water resources to a specific crop and vice versa. The developed system is tested on groundwater recourses in Siwa Oasis, Egypt.