Expert system for student advising using JESS

Abstract

Student advising is one of the many critical service responsibilities that faculty have in academia. Often times, however, students have very similar questions about which courses to take, the sequence of courses, and deadlines. If programs have a striated system of student standings, this further confounds the students as they may not be eligible to take certain courses due to their current status in the program. Faculty also tend to be pressed for time with research, teaching and other committee responsibilities. This results in increased frustrations for both students and faculty alike. Expert systems are software applications that respond to use queries by analyzing data captured in knowledge systems. JESS is a Java-based rule engine and scripting environment that allows the development of such an expert system. In this work, we develop an expert system using JESS that allows students to seek quick responses to their queries regarding their plan of study and progress in the program. This expert system separates the rules from the execution thus enabling users to customize or extend the system by changing or updating the XML file that stores the rules.