Eliciting and Using Experiential Knowledge and General Expertise

Abstract

Expert systems generally contain the knowledge of human domain experts in the form of heuristic rules. The heuristics encapsulate the rules of thumb that the experts have gained through extensive experience in the field. These experience-proven heuristics are used by the experts as a major part of their problem-solving approach. When confronted with rare and novel problems to which the heuristics may not apply, human experts can apply, in addition, their fundamental understanding—or “deep knowledge”—of the domain. In GTE’s COMPASS and PROPHET expert systems, we have elicited and used expert knowledge that is at an intermediate level, lying between knowledge based on direct experience and knowledge based on fundamental domain principles. We call this intermediate level expertise knowledge. Use of this type of knowledge allowed us to extend the range of both the resulting systems beyond the heuristics gained from the experts’ field experience.