A knowledge representation language for university requirements

Intelligent systems with applications in an academic environment are becoming a reality. Such systems can offer intelligent assistance in tasks ranging from interactive scheduling, academic planning, office automation, database management and computer assisted instruction. The problem of designing a general requirements model for university degrees is investigated. A method for expressing the structure of university requirements is described, and a representation language consisting of a subset of Prolog based on set theoretic primitives is suggested. This work has been motivated by the authors’ experience with the Academic Planning Environment (APE) expert system project whose goal has been to study the use of knowledge-based techniques in the advising and assistance of university students in the planning of their studies towards an academic degree.