Web-Based Domain Specific Tool for Building Plant Protection Expert Systems

This work describes a tool that aids the development of a plant protection expert system (ES) for field crops. It is the result of accumulation of knowledge and expertise for building agricultural expert systems for about 20 years in the Central Laboratory for agricultural Expert Systems (CLAES). We have found out that all crop management tasks are candidate for using the ES technology to transfer expertise from highly qualified human experts to small farmers through intermediaries whom we call, extension workers in the agriculture domain. Plant protection tasks are part of crop management of any crop which need expertise that can be better represented in symbolic knowledge representation schemes rather than other tasks, like irrigation and fertilization which includes mathematical models more than symbolic knowledge. In addition to that annual yield losses due to pests are estimated to be in billions of dollars worldwide. Therefore, a decision has been taken to develop a plant protection expert systems building tool to expedite the development and maintenance processes of plant protection expert systems for field crops. Analyzing the plant protection task we come up with four sub tasks namely: variety selection, cultural practices, pest diagnosis, and pest control. The second section will address the importance of building such tool. The third section will describe previous related work. The fourth section will describe the design and implementation of the tool, its web interfaces and its four main components corresponding to the four agricultural sub tasks : variety selection, cultural practices, pest diagnosis, and pest control. The fifth section will include our experience in developing the Barley expert system using this tool. The last section will conclude the chapter and propose new ideas for future research needed to enhance the tool.