Research On Case-Oriented Intelligent Tutoring In Traditional Chinese Medicine

National Knowledge Infrastructure (NKI for short) is being built to provide an effective knowledge services for people in general and a knowledge foundation for hi-tech products in particular. The NKI will contain knowledge from sources such as encyclopedias and textbooks. How to design and implement a tutoring system to help people to learn knowledge in the NKI knowledge bases is an important research area.We are building" an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS for short) called TCMTutor to help people study Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM for short).Based on the NKI TCM Knowledge Base, we design the case model, student model and tutoring process, etc. This thesis contributes in the following:· Designing the tutoring process of TCMTutor. Based on the advanced theories such as situated cognition theory and constructivism learning theory, applying a variety of technologies, especially NKI knowledge processing technology and artificial intelligence, we design the tutoring process.· Building and implementing an ITS system model called TCMTutor. The system model contains 7 components: Case Model, Case Base, Pedagogical Module, Student Model, Knowledge Base, Communication Module and Expert Model. We introduced each aspect of the system model. TCMTutor advocates practice, by doing many clinic cases, students may obtain the clinic experience. At the same time, Case Module is a very important model.· Studying the knowledge representation and acquisition of TCM. Knowledge is the basis of the ITS, we introduced the method of TCM knowledge representation and TCM knowledge acquisition, TCM ontology and axiom acquisition. We have acquired TCM knowledge to support TCMTutor.· Building a case model. Case model is the kernel of TCMTutor. This part we iscuss case ontology and the form of case storage. We designed five case types and three levels of cases. We also designed the case explaining mechanism and false analytic mechanism. At the end we have studied the source of the case.· Building a student model. Student model is an important part of ITS. This thesis discussed the structure, function, realization method of the student model. We also introduced the evaluation method of knowledge mastering and cognitive ability of the student.· Building an expert model and a communication module. The function of the expert model is to acquire the knowledge and the case of experts, supplement the NKI TCM knowledge base and TCM case base. Communication module which we also call student interface is the medium between the student and the system. It is a platform of teaching. Student interface uses many means such as multimedia video, multimedia audio, pictures, text and so forth to enhance tutoring.