February 1996 — Features
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KARMA: The Knowledge Acquisition Reference Multimedia Aid
Knowledge Acquisition
Knowledge acquisition is the process of acquiring knowledge from an expert or multiple experts for developing the knowledge base of the expert system. Knowledge acquisition is still the biggest bottleneck in expert systems development due to a number of reasons.
First, it is fairly labor- and time-intensive to interview the expert(s) and handcraft this acquired knowledge into a knowledge base.
Second, many knowledge engineers may not be well-skilled and experienced in interviewing or using other knowledge acquisition techniques (like learning by analogy, observation, protocol analysis, etc.), thereby making the knowledge acquisition (and knowledge representation) process an arduous task.
Third, the "knowledge engineering" paradox says that the more expert an individual, the more compiled the knowledge and the harder it is to extract. Thus, the knowledge acquisition process is a difficult one, especially exposing the rules of thumb (i.e., heuristics) that the expert has compiled over many years of experience.
The process of knowledge acquisition transcends the "mere" expert system project development. Knowledge acquisition is a methodology rooted in cognitive psychology, individual and group dynamics, and other interdisciplinary disciplines. By being a "good interviewer," this should enable someone to not only be useful as a knowledge engineer, but also helpful in other professions (like news reporting, medical diagnosis, etc.) as well.
Surprisingly, there are very few knowledge acquisition courses offered at universities and industry.[5] In order to lessen the difficulty of performing knowledge acquisition and to better educate students on this subject, multimedia aids and automated knowledge acquisition tools are needed to support the knowledge engineer.
Towards this goal, KARMA has been developed as a multimedia aid for helping the student learn about knowledge acquisition. (Note: it is not a tool for automating the knowledge acquisition process.)
Developing KARMA
The development of KARMA was principally a two-member team effort. Christine Letsky, the lead multimedia specialist in the Multimedia Lab at CISAT/JMU, served as the multimedia specialist for KARMA. The content specialist was professor Jay Liebowitz, who has taught courses on knowledge acquisition and has written numerous papers on this subject and expert systems.[6] This team also worked on the first CD-ROM project, "Developing Your First Expert System," and had a good working relationship.
Authorware Professional was selected as the multimedia authoring language for KARMA.
