A portfolio of knowledge acquisition approaches for a knowledge-based system

The authors discuss the knowledge acquisition required for the development of a system to diagnose communication problems for users of a large mainframe time-sharing system. A field study approach was used to exploit the experiences and existing knowledge structures of the technicians. It was found that multiple forms of knowledge acquisition and representation were required for the development of the system, since no one form of knowledge acquisition was found to provide insight into each of the different types of knowledge that ultimately were used in the development of the system. Thus, it is suggested that individual task comparisons of different forms of knowledge acquisition may understate or misstate the problems of interest to developers of expert systems. Individual approaches each have their own strengths and weaknesses, so that, in a portfolio of approaches, weaknesses of one approach can be mitigated by strengths of other approaches