Abstract:
Modern information and communication technology is revolutionizing how courts
function, reducing backlogs by speeding up case resolutions and improving citizen access
to trial proceedings and disposition. Ethiopia’s system of justice has suffered from long
delays that undermined public confidence in the rule of law and imperiled rights granted
under the Constitution. Family law, that governs the family related cases, is an area
which can potentially benefit much from ICT. To address such problem, this study
attempts to design and develop a knowledge-based Decision Support System that can
provide advice to judge, lawyers and facilitate the judgment service within family law
customers. To this end, knowledge is acquired using both structured and unstructured
interviews from domain experts which are selected using purposive sampling technique
from ANRS Supreme Court and Bahir Dar zuryia woreda court office. Relevant
documents analysis method is also followed to capture explicit knowledge. Then, the
acquired knowledge is modeled using decision tree that represent concepts and
production rules are used to represent the domain knowledge and knowledge-based
system is developed using SWI Prolog editor tool. Thus, the overall total performance of
the prototype system is evaluated. The prototype system achieves 85% and it is a good
performance and meets the objectives of the study. However, to make the system
applicable in the domain area for court decision makings additional study is needed like
updating the rules in the knowledge base of the system automatically and incorporating a
well designed user interface.
Keywords: Knowledge-Based System, Decision Support system, family law, court
advisory.