A network problem diagnosis expert system based on web services

Web services are a link of service-oriented architecture (SOA), a hot research topic in recent years. Their application is present in collaborative commerce and other service-oriented systems. This study incorporates two major theoretic frameworks, expert systems and Web services, and applies them to computer network problem diagnosis in order to help users find appropriate recommendations and solutions for different network problems facing them. The system in the study employs the ASP.net environment for development in order to demonstrate the control and knowledge segregation characteristics. SQL server is selected as the knowledge base storage tool to give managers more system flexibility and allow them to easily modify contents of the knowledge and rules. Further, due to the cross-interface characteristics of Web services and the fact that the simple object access protocol (SOAP) employs the hyper text transfer protocol (HTTP) as the basic transmission protocol, there will be more and more platforms supporting Internet browsing in the future as mobile computation technology and equipment mature. The system therefore will be in line with the trend. It will be applied to different software/hardware platforms to maximize application benefits.