ShellAg: Expert System Shell for Agricultural Crops

An Expert System Shell is an interface for strengthening, refining and maintaining the knowledgebase of an Expert System by directly interacting with it. The expert system shell is a complete development environment for developing and maintaining Knowledge-Based Applications and Expert Systems. It provides a step-by-step methodology for a knowledge engineer that allows the domain experts themselves to be directly involved in structuring and encoding the knowledge through an expert interface. Agriculture being a multidisciplinary science there is a scope of developing multiple expert systems for various crops, disease, insects, irrigation scheduling, fertilizer management and various other issues needed for a sustainable agriculture. There has been no such system or software that supports information management in this area. Developing such a platform for developing multidisciplinary and multi crop expert systems is a new approach that can provide computational convenience to replicate it for multiple crops. The shell described in this paper deals with the development procedure of multi crop expert system using the same inference engine used for "Expert System on Wheat Crop Management" developed by Division of Computer Applications, IASRI, New Delhi.