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Cloud-Based Environmental Impact Assessment Expert System – A Case Study of Fiji
Sam Goundar
Pages - 45 - 61     |    Revised - 15-11-2013     |    Published - 30-11-2013
Volume - 4   Issue - 3    |    Publication Date - November 2013  Table of Contents
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KEYWORDS
Expert Systems, Environmental Impact Assessment EIA Expert Systems, EIA DSS.
ABSTRACT
Environmental impact assessments [EIA] involve identifying, measuring, and assessing impacts. This complex process deals with considerable amount of information and requires processing and analysis of quantitative data, qualitative information as well as expert human judgements. Often, available information is incomplete, subjective, and inconsistent. This challenge of collecting, processing, analyzing, and reporting EIA information can be met by computer systems. A Cloud-based Environmental Impact Assessment [EIA] system is proposed in this paper to overcome the many challenges faced by practitioners. Fiji’s EIA process is used as a case study. The steps involved in the process are automated as a sequence of computer executable programs with Expert System. Based on the information provided about projects, the EIA system is expected to compute environmental impacts and produce Environment Impact Statements. With the system, a user enters information about the environmental settings in which the development project is expected to take place as well as the proposed development project activities. Based on the input, an expert system with an inference engine uses rules to check the knowledge base and report on possible impacts and mitigation actions. The knowledge base is connected to databases on domain experts, GIS and simulation models.
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Dr. Sam Goundar
Information Technology Bay of Plenty Polytechnic Tauranga - New Zealand
sam.goundar@boppoly.ac.nz


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