Knowledge elicitation

In this chapter the enterprise of knowledge elicitation, the process of explicating domain specific knowledge underlying human performance, and the cognitive issues that surround this practice are reviewed. Knowledge elicitation had its formal beginnings in the mid to late 1980's in the context of knowledge engineering for expert systems. Expert systems are computer programs that embody domain-specific knowledge and that perform (e.g., decision making, problem solving, design) at levels typical of human experts, (but not necessarily in exactly the same manner as human experts). Knowledge engineering is broadly defined here as the process of building knowledge-based systems or applications. These include expert systems, as well as intelligent tutoring systems, adaptive user-interfaces, and even knowledge-oriented selection and training devices. The process of knowledge engineering involves knowledge acquisition which includes knowledge elicitation and other activities such as knowledge explication and conceptual modeling (Regoczei & Hirst, 1992), as well as the coding of the resulting knowledge, the design of a usable interface, and the testing and evaluation of this interface (Diaper, 1989b). Thus, knowledge elicitation is a subprocess of knowledg