Supporting inter-expert cooperative work in expert system development

Group support systems (GSS) have been shown to improve the satisfaction and performance of multi-user decision making processes. This study describes how they can be used to acquire knowledge from multiple domain experts for building the explanation facilities of expert systems. In the first stage of the research, a manual iterative Delphi approach was used to acquire knowledge from five experts to build the explanation facility of a financial analysis expert system. In the second stage, which is proposed in this paper, the researchers utilize GSS tools to repeat the acquisition of knowledge in a computer supported cooperative work environment. By comparing the “manual” and the “computer supported cooperative work” procedures, the study attempts to empirically the usefulness of GSS tools for the acquisition of knowledge from multiple experts