Towards situated knowledge acquisition

Abstract

Situated cognition is not a mere philosophical concern: it has pragmatic implications for current practice in knowledge acquisition. Tools must move from being design-focused to being maintenance-focused. Reuse-based approaches (e.g. using problem solving methods) will fail unless the reused descriptions can be extensively modified to suit the new situation. Knowledge engineers must model not only descriptions of expert knowledge, but also the environment in which a knowledge base will perform. Descriptions of knowledge must be constantly re-evaluated. This re-evaluation process has implications for assessing representations 1 .

Critical success metrics: evaluation at the business level

“…Human cognitive processes are notoriously hard to formalize. The experience of expert systems developers is that any current speci"cation of an expert solution to a problem is incomplete (Menzies, 1998b). As experience with an expert system accumulates, inadequacies in the system's reasoning will always be detected.…”

Brahms: simulating practice for work systems design

“…Brown, Collins & Duguid, 1988;Resnick, Levine & Teasley, 1991;Agre, 1997;Clark, 1997); the point of this overview is that situated cognition is not just a claim about ''the context-dependent nature of symbolic descriptions of human knowledge'' (Menzies, 1998). Instead, criticisms of the ''symbolic'' approach to building an artificial intelligence (see e.g.…”

From open IS semantics to the Semantic Web: the road ahead

“…The metalevel approach has since been applied to areas ranging from blackboard system architectures 14 to knowledge acquisition and sharing. 15,16 Combining the elements of knowledge representation, semantic agreement, and distributed reasoning became the mainstay of research into multiagent systems and distributed AI in the 1990s. Work on systems such as the Open Agent Architecture, 17 …”