Design and Development Of A Knowledge Based System For Common And Zoonotic Cattle Disease Diagnosis And Treatment

Abstract

There are different kinds of Cattle diseases in Ethiopia. These diseases can be easily transmitted throughout the country unless appropriate measures are taken. The agents for these diseases are: Virus, Fungus, Bacteria and others which can be a combination of them. Hence, cattle diseases do not only affect Cattle but also they affect human health and wellbeing of the household, through different zoonotic animal diseases which can be easily transmitted from animal to human. To address those problems, this research work aimed to Design and Develop a Knowledge Based System for Diagnosis Cattle Diseases and to recommend future action particularly, on common and Zoonotic Cattle Diseases. The knowledge was gathered by conducting both structured and unstructured interview from the domain experts and documents analysis. Purposive sampling method was used to acquire knowledge from three domain experts: from East Shoa Agricultural office and two experts from Addis Ababa University Veterinary institutes. After the knowledge was acquired; it was modeled by using decision tree to represent the domain knowledge. The knowledge was organized in an easily to understand ways by using if?��?then knowledge representation method. The prototype was implemented by using JESS for the knowledge base and inference engine coding and java with Eclipse IDE for the graphical user interface development. The user acceptance evaluation scored 82.28% by the domain expert and 76.92% using randomly selected test cases. The proposed knowledge based system would recommend for future research to be integrated with case based reason and fuzzy logic that might increase the performance of proposed system.