An Expert System for Management of Poultry Diseases Halimat Arowolo, Babalola Amosa + and Emmanuel Faleye. Department of Computer Science, Federal Polytechnic, Ede, Nigeria. Abstract. Expert system could keep knowledge in its knowledge base as the system knowledge resources and manipulate that knowledge. So it could prepare the high level decision tool to the user that is called inference engine as the brain of the system. On the other hand, expert system could help people in many cases in order to get decision in solving a problem. This work aimed at developing an expert system for diagnosing poultry diseases which could also be used both by the farmer and the experts to train their students. The knowledge was elicited from the experts through interview and literature review. The knowledge was represented in the system using a rule based approach. The unified modeling language was used to describe the design of the system. Visual prolog 7.3 was used to develop the expert system. The system was tested using Design Criterion and Knowledge Base Expert System for Stratified Root. Keywords: Poultry, Expert system, Inference engine, Knowledge base and Prolog. 1. Introduction Poultry constitute by far the largest group of livestock and are estimated to number about 14,000 million, consisting mainly of chickens, ducks and turkeys. Throughout the developing world, many living in rural areas keep small flocks of scavenging poultry. These birds are usually chickens and have an important role to play in poverty alleviation and food security. The flocks are small but important - providing meat and eggs for family consumption, for sale to provide additional income, or for social obligations. Rural poultry also provide manure and are active in pest control. But for long time, poultry diseases have been one of the main problems to influent our poultry industry development; have become the bottleneck limiting the development of our poultry industry. To fit the basic strategy of “prevention is first, prevention is more important than cure”, we try to solve the logic reasoning of poultry disease diagnosis through the computer, and taking this chance, discuss the problems of realizing the poultry disease diagnosis. The designing is that we come to the basic rule through the comparison of data and come to the preliminary diagnosis. An Expert System is an intelligent computer program that uses knowledge and inference procedures to solve problems difficult enough to require significant human expertise to solve [1]. 1.1. Justification of the Study The subject of economic analysis of poultry production has received considerable attention in the literature [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7]. [8] claimed that poultry production in Nigeria as well as in other warm climate countries has a high priority rating compared with other types of livestock because poultry has better energy and protein conversion ratio and that net return on investment are relatively high. Poultry was chosen because its importance should not be compromised. But the fact is that many farmers in this region do not know how to effectively treat poultry diseases. Another factor is insufficient poultry extension agents to give explanation to poultry farmers. The agent was limited by time, chance and any other limitation that could be solved by expert system. While we know that expert system have many advantages that could help people + Corresponding author. Tel.: +234 8034719314 E-mail address: amosabmg@yahoo.com 113 2012 International Conference on Computer Technology and Science (ICCTS 2012) IPCSIT vol. 47 (2012) © (2012) IACSIT Press, Singapore DOI: 10.7763/IPCSIT.2012.V47.22