Constructing a Web-based Employee Training Expert System with Data

Mining Approach

Kuang-Ku Chen1, Mu-Yen Chen1, Hui-Ju Wu2, Yi-Lung Lee1, 3

1
Department of Accounting, National Changhua University of Education
2
Department of Industrial Education and Technology, National Changhua University of
Education
3
Department of Mechatronics Engineering, National Changhua University of Education
Changhua, 500, Taiwan, ROC
Kungku83@ms47.hinet.tw, chenmy@cc.ncue.edu.tw, d94311001@mail.ncue.edu.tw,
lee@teraauto.com.tw

Abstract system in which employees can participate knowledge

Knowledge Management (KM) is an important
strategy in business management and competition in
21st century. Companies must manage their valuable
knowledge and experience more aggressively to
enhance competitive advantage and human resource
management (HRM). In this paper, we present a web-
based training system named ETES - Employee
Training Expert System and the methodologies of its
implementation. ETES applied rule-based expert
system technology to infer the learning type for
employees. Moreover, ETES uses association rule
mining to find training strategies and learning map for
personal learning. Besides, ETES provides different
training materials for employees according to their
learning aptitudes, records and occupations. The
system has been tested and is now in pilot use by
Teraauto Corporation which is a high-profits listed
securities company in Taiwan.
1. Introduction
In information technology age, the huge amount of
data make user to be at sea. Applying advanced
informational technology on accelerating collection,
sharing, communication and application of knowledge
has become an important issue. Human resources are
considered the most important asset of an organization,
but very few organizations are able to fully harness its
potential. Therefore, the enterprises develop
knowledge management (KM) successfully through
well-organization human resource management
(HRM). Because advantage of knowledge management
sharing, innovation and collective creation. A
universally accepted definition of KM does not yet
exist. While there is debate as to whether knowledge
itself is a cognitive state, a process, an object, the
description of KM as a process, based on
understanding organization as a knowledge system.
Therefore, to apply knowledge management concept to
human resource management can not only get the
inspiration of innovation strategy but also promote
organization performance. Hence, the HRM will be
followed out successful if enterprises can put KM
process into effect.
This paper constructs frameworks of knowledge
management through interview for knowledge workers
and enterprise. Besides, we develop the Employee
Training Expert System (ETES) which uses artificial
intelligence approach to provide the suggestion for
knowledge management training courses, to improve
the employees of learning and knowledge acquisition
easily. It also can make traditional organization
develop to learning organization and enhance its
competitive advantages.
The organization of the paper is as follows.
Reviews of related work are first described in Section
2. Section 3 demonstrates the system design and
implementation of ETES. The system performance
evaluation is presented in Section 4. Finally, the
conclusion and future work are discussed in Section 5.
2. Preliminaries
2.1. Expert Systems in Human Resource
Management

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 Seaman states, “the major purpose of expert system
systems is to help people make decisions” [8].
Therefore, many expert systems have been developed
for use specifically in the HRM field. Byun and Suh
also provide an excellent overview of the ways in
which expert system can be successful in assisting
managers in critical decision-making [2]. They suggest
that the HRM domains of planning, job analysis,
recruitment, selection, performance evaluation,
compensation, training, and labor-management
relationships are the most appropriate for the
development of ES.
Several of the expert systems which have been
developed in the HRM area will be represented in the
following section and include the Service Selection
Advisor [6], Resumix [3], and EXPER [9]. Service
Selection Advisor (SSE) assisted midshipmen in
choosing career fields by analyzing results of a
narrative summary of the student, a physical exam, and
a security questionnaire balanced against six career
field choices of the student. They reported that the ES
“performs as well as human advisors in evaluating a
midshipman’s chances for being selected for a
particular career field. Organizational Consultant was
designed to assist in organizational structure decisions.
Its knowledge base of 250-plus rules represents an ES
attempt to match an appropriate organizational
structure with a stated or given organizational
environment. Resumix demonstrates the capability of
an ES to evaluate a resume or job application. The
system was reported to have been used by the Clinton
White House to wade through volumes of resumes for
positions in the new administration [1]. Finally,
EXPER evaluates employees in order to match their
aptitudes with specific jobs within an organization.
The evaluation items are included test scores,
educational levels, and aptitude scores. EXPER uses
these variables to assist managers in making right
developments; and (3) communicating existing
systems to newcomers.
Lau et al. constructed the Object-Oriented Virtual
Agent (OOVA) module to deploy an Intelligent [4]
Task Management System (ITMS). It can usefully be
used in a manufacturing information network. Menzies
also suggested the object-oriented programming can be
as another alternative to develop expert systems [7].
3. ETES System Design and Development
Figure 1 shows the architecture of the ETES expert
system from the viewpoint of its functionalities. ETES
consists of four main components: Java Expert System
Shell (JESS); Database Set (DS); Knowledge Extractor
(KE); and Web Mining (WM). JESS was composed of
an inference engine, an XML-based knowledge
description, and an explanation system. DS was
constructed of a general database, a knowledge base,
and a web log database. KE was made up of a web-
based knowledge elicitation tool and an object-oriented
knowledge acquisition editor. WM was primary
included in association rule mining module. Further,
ETES still has a user interface and makes convenience
for employees to browse the ETES.

2.2. Object-Oriented Methodology

Object-oriented methodology combines into one

object data together with the specific procedures that
operate on this data, where the object combines data
and program code. Instead of passing data to
procedures, programs send a message for an object to
perform a procedure that is already embedded in it.
Then, the same message may be sent to many different
objects, but each will implement that message Figure 1. System architecture of ETES
differently. Using object-oriented methodology may 3.1. User Interface
have three benefits: (1) reusing parts of the conceptual
models of old implementations; (2) guiding the current Li et al. found that most of the web-based expert
development based on using successful previous systems seem lack of friendly end-to-end supporting

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 tools for development and maintenance [5]. Thus,
ETES was developed using compound web application
techniques to represent web-based user interface, such
as HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and JSP
(Java Server Page). Finally, ETES can use text and
graphics to explain the suggestions for employees.
Different interfaces are designed for employee
personal information, conclusions and
recommendations, and discussion board. Screenshots
for training courses information and training strategy
results are showed in Figs. 2 and 3.
Figure 2. A screen shot for user interface on courses
search
Figure 3. A screen shot for user interface for
suggestion results
3.2. Java Expert System Shell (JESS)
JESS is a rule engine and scripting environment
written entirely in Sun's JavaTM language and based on
NORM (New Object-Oriented Rule-base Model)
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knowledge model [10]. JESS was originally inspired
by the CLIPS expert system shell, but has grown into a
complete, distinct, dynamic environment of its own.
Using JESS, developers can use its forward chaining
capability to "reason" and extract knowledge which is
expressed in the form of declarative rules.
(1)Inference Engine
Users can inquire the system using an inference
engine that automatically matches facts against patterns
and concludes which rules are fired in ETES. For
example, employees must input their job’s main
requirements at first, and then ETES will check the
description. If the main requirements are not matching
company’s on-the-job training policy characteristics,
system will reply the “No Results” message to
employees. Otherwise, system will move on to request
five human resource management processes: seniority,
department, position, course, grade and try to catch the
detail employees’ need in their working job. After
successful matching completed, ETES will identify the
training strategy and the system will generate
conclusions of the diagnosis, suggestion courses, and
explain the inference processes.
(2)XML-based Knowledge Descriptor
The component is used to transform the inference
requests into a uniform rule-based knowledge
representation for the knowledge base. The rules are
represented in XML-based document and
corresponding syntax defined in Document Type
Definition (DTD) file. DTD also includes the
information about what elements must be presented,
and what their attributes are.
(3)Explanation System
While users want to know how the training
suggestions generate, or what the main reasons cause
the training strategy, ETES will acquire related
information by mining training resource databases
through Database Set and Knowledge Extractor which
functionality will be explained in the following
sections 3.3 and 3.4.
3.3. Database Set
(1)General Database
Database of training resources plays an important
role of the ETES. It is used for storing all the
information needed for on-the-job training diagnosis.
The databases include a seniority database, a
department database, a position database, a course
database, and a grade database.
(2)Knowledge Base
 Rules are the most common method for representing
knowledge in expert system, so ETES adopts "IF-
THEN" format to implement knowledge base and
operates all the rules for the training strategy diagnosis.
Each rule has two parts—a symptom pattern part and
an action part, and in the form of "IF symptom pattern
S, THEN the training strategy T". For example, if
symptoms have "5 years seniority", “manager in sales
department”, “and "basis administration courses were
all attended”, then the teaching strategy is “suggest
attending advance administration courses”.
A normal "if-then" rule is used to match the
symptoms with identified job requirements and
employees’ need look like as following and its
relational database representation showed in Table 1.
Format: IF (Seniority = “D1”, Department = “S”,
Position = “M”, Course = “B”, and Grade = “H”,
THEN (Strategy = “4”)
the facts and generating rules (Fig. 4 illustrates the
design interface). The interface can gather data on
training strategy, training courses related information,
employees’ personal information and Certainty Factor
(CF) values. This online elicitation system can be used
by experts who are authorized to access it. It can help
experts to update rules associated with ETES
knowledge base. This process not only ensures KE
defining the rule-based knowledge well, but also
assists the expert in clarifying the reasoning
procedures. It provides the experts a natural language
description of the HRM knowledge just elicited and
consequently automates the development of the ETES
explanation facility. Then, the knowledge will be
stored in general database.

Table 1. A sample 「 IF-THEN 」 rule database for

training strategy

Figure 4. A sample interface for Web-based

knowledge elicitation

(2)Object-Oriented Knowledge Acquisition Editor

(3)Web Log Database
Database of web log files plays an important role of
the ETES. It is used for recording all the information
for employees browsing behaviors and selection
courses. The databases primaries include a employee
database, and a selection course database. The goal of
this database is want to know the relationship between
employees and selection courses.
The object-oriented graphical interface provides a
modelling platform that is easily understood by experts
and knowledge engineers. ETES also associates with
each rule a CF that represents a degree of belief in the
rule. The CF ranges from -1 to 1: -1 means the rule is
known to be false, 0 means no information is known,
and 1 means the rule is known to be true (Fig. 5
illustrates the design tool).

3.4. Knowledge Extractor

Knowledge Extractor is used to extract the knowledge
from the experts and then store the extracted
knowledge into the general database, and knowledge
base of ETES.

(1)Web-based Knowledge Elicitor

A web-based knowledge elicitation system was
designed to assist the experts and KE is used to collect

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Figure 5. Knowledge acquisition editor with object-
oriented graphical tool
3.5. Web Mining
To further investigate whether the employees in
each style would choose potential courses, association
rule mining was then used to extract the prediction rule
set RSi from the background of the employees
associated with each cluster. The cluster Ci to which a
employee, e, belonged was first identified. Then, RSi,
the recommendation rule set extracted from Ci was
used to predict the candidate future potential elective
courses for employee e. All candidate potential
elective courses were classified and ranked according
to the associated confidence of the recommendation
rules. Then the highest ranked candidate potential
elective courses were selected as the recommended
rule. The minimum confidence level was set to 0.8 and
the minimum support to 0.1. The following rule is an
example of a quantitative association rule, where X is a
variable representation an employee. In this example,
the employee has some personal background and has
already taken the “Business Administration“course.
Therefore the mining result will suggest for this
employee to select “Knowledge Management“as his
potential elective course.
Seniority(X, “Medium“) ∧ Department(X, “Sales“)
∧ Position(X, “Medium“) ∧ Course(X, “Business
Administration“) ∧ Grade(X, “High“)
⇒ Courses Recommendation (X, “Knowledge
Management“)
4. Performance Evaluation of ETES and
Discussion
To evaluate the performance of ETES, quite a lot of
tests are preformed. To demonstrate how the test was
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executed, one simulation which involves 20 cases was
selected and each case went through the testing. The
results of the 20 different test cases shown in Table 2
were obtained from the HR consultants and the ETES
independently. It can be seen that almost identical
answers from ETES and the HR consultants and the
results are satisfactory. In Table 2, the answers
provided by HR consultants or ETES stand for
different training strategies:
1 － Basis administration course: Business English
2 － Basis administration course: Business Software
and Applications
3 － Basis administration course: Business
Administration
4 － Advance administration course: Oral
Communication in Business
5 － Advance administration course: Knowledge
Management
6 － Basis engineering course: Electromagnetic
7 － Basis engineering course: Electronics
8 － Basis engineering course: Digital Control Systems
9 － Advance engineering course: Advanced
Electrodynamics
10 － Advance engineering course: Advanced
Electronics
11 － Basis R&D course: Digital Circuits and Systems
12 － Basis R&D course: Digital Integrated Circuit
13 － Advance R&D course: VLSI System Design
14 － Advance R&D course: Biochip Technology
15 － No Match
In addition, we also tried to diagnose all of the
training strategy (100 types of courses) in the
application domain, the results illustrated that ETES
had high reliable and accurate diagnostic capabilities.
5. Conclusion
In this paper, we have presented a web-based on-
the-job training system named ETES. ETES can serve
as an assistant and a consultant tool. Our experience
has shown the effectiveness of this method. The use of
an object-oriented knowledge acquisition editor
provides many significant benefits to knowledge
engineers and domain expert. Furthermore, the object-
oriented model improves the usability of the
knowledge model and provides the opportunity for
reuse of the knowledge in similar domains. By using
the web-based knowledge elicitation, the difficulty of
communicating with experts is virtually eliminated
through user-friendly interface. In addition, the courses
description of each training strategy enables the
 experts to provide a natural language description of the
knowledge just elicited and consequently automates
the development of the ETES explanation capability.
Table 2. Testing results of ETES and the HR
Consultants
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