Keywords: knowledge elicitation, expert systems, intelligent systems, methodology, Concept Maps, Abstraction-Decompo- sition, critical decision method
Introduction
The transgenerational transmission of the wisdom of elders via storytelling is as old as humanity itself. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Craft Guilds had well-specified procedures for the transmission of knowledge, and indeed gave us the developmental scale that is still widely used: initiate, novice, apprentice, journeyman, expert, and master (Hoffman, 1998). Based on interviews and observations of the workplace, Denis Diderot (along with 140 others, including Emile Voltaire) created one of the great works of the Enlightenment, the 17 volume Encyclopedie (Diderot, 1751–1772), which explained many “secrets” – the knowledge and procedures in a number of tradecrafts. The emergent science of psychology of the 1700s and 1800s also involved research that, in hindsight, might legitimately be regarded as knowledge elicitation (KE). For instance, a number of studies of reasoning were conducted in the laboratory of Wilhelm Wundt, and some of these involved university professors as the research participants (Militello & Hoffman, forthcoming). In the decade prior to World War I, the stage was set in Europe for applied and industrial psychology; much of that work involved the systematic study of proficient domain practitioners (see Hoffman & Deffenbacher, 1992).
The focus of this chapter is on a more recent acceleration of research that involves the elicitation and representation of expert knowledge (and the subsequent use of the representations, in design).