LACONEX: A rule-based implementation to advise on plot-level land conservation in Vilathikulam, southeastern India

Knowledge about land conservation exists along a spatial continuum, represented at the broadest level (with least depth) by international-level experts who have international-level expertise, and at the narrowest level (with most depth) by the individual farmer with the most site-specific knowledge at the plot level. This continuum covers many different aspects of knowledge about land degradation and its amelioration, including technical and cultural knowledge. This paper reports an effort (one in a series of steps) to gather, formalize, codify, and operationalize knowledge about land conservation from two different levels of the continuum. Land conservation knowledge was elicited from farmers and extension agents in Vilathikulam taluk (an area of contiguous villages) in Tamil Nadu, southeastern India, using semi-structured interviews. The knowledge thus gained was combined with knowledge from the literature on soils and land conservation for the area. This information was organized into factual knowledge and process knowledge, and implemented in the form of general recommendations, constraints, and specific recommendations. The process of arriving at these categories was organized into several steps using a spatial anchor and soil type as keys. These were operationalized in a rule-based computer program (LAnd CONservation EXpert-LACONEX), which offers land conservation advice at the plot level for Vilathikulam taluk, using an expert system development environment.