Abstract:
This paper investigates the effective use of ICT models to facilitate
the transferring of knowledge to farmers in order to solve their problems in
the Agricultural sector in Sri Lankan context. Farmers in rural areas are faced
with the difficulties in consulting agricultural specialists, to solve their
problems including pests and disease identification as agricultural specialists
are less in numbers. There has been some initiatives to address this problem
through ICT based models, however, as due to poor IT literacy and less
access to IT infrastructure farmers have not been able to reap the benefits of
these systems. This paper proposes an ICT based model to deliver
information through kiosks established in a public place where all farmers
can be able to access. The pilot prototype is developed using icon-based
interactive interfaces and simple set of functionalities, mainly targeting
computer illiterate farmers. The content will be delivered in farmer’s local
language. Our proposed solution is mainly focused on pest and disease
identification and suggests remedies to treat them by providing appropriate
web based solution using rule based expert system. JESS expert system shell
is used to build the system and inference the knowledge using backward
chaining. The inference engine selects the appropriate rules from knowledge
base and use facts to retrieve the queries from database to display localized
text to user. The expert system diagnoses diseases on the basis of responses
of user made against queries related to particular disease symptoms which
are triggered from rules in the knowledge base. The evaluation reveals that
80% of farmers are satisfied with this solution and findings appear to be
promising
