Comparing the Conceptual Systems of Experts

The knowledge to be acquired for the development of knowledge based systems is often distributed across a group of experts rather than available for elicitation from a single expert. Group elicitation presents major problems because experts can disagree on the use of concepts and vocabulary, and this disagreement may be tacit causing confusion. This paper describes a computer-supported methodology for knowledge acquisition from groups in which the conceptual frameworks of different experts are compared in a way that makes such disagreements overt and readily identifiable. 1 Sources of Dissent in Conceptual Systems Computer elicitation of entity-attribute, or repertory, grids has proved to be a powerful technique for acquiring the declarative knowledge structures of an expert in a domain [Shaw and Gaines, 1983, 1987, Boose 1984, Boose and Bradshaw, 1987, Diederich et al, 1987, Gaines, 1987a]. Entity-attribute grids are used to elicit from the expert two types of information about a par...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1989
• Where: IJCAI
• Authors: Brian R. Gaines, Mildred L. G. Shaw
• Keywords: Experts, IJCAI 1989, IJCAI 2007, Knowledge Based Systems, Knowledge Structures