The acquisition of knowledge for expert systems is most frequently impeded by a lack of communication between the experts and the knowledge engineers involved in building such systems. This is sometimes rooted in the knowledge engineer's lack of understanding of the specialist terms of the domain and at other times this is rooted in the fact that the knowledge engineer cannot ask the relevant questions of the expert. We propose a group-oriented knowledge acquisition methodology where members of the specialist domain community form an interface group which then helps in formulating relevant questions of the expert, helps in elaborating specialist terminology, and generally critiques the inputs and outputs to and from the knowledge engineer. This methodology can be fruitfully supplemented by creating a collection of domain texts. including transcripts of the interviews and other material suggested by the interface group, for extracting terms and heuristics. Various aspects of the proposed methodology are elaborated with reference to an expert systems development project executed by the authors over the last three years.

purchase the full-text of this paper (price £20)

go to the next paper
return to the table of contents
return to the book description
purchase this book (price £65 +P&P)