Abstract
Our inter-disciplinary research examines new approaches to knowledge acquisition through the exploitation of linguistic and societal metaphors. We argue that conventional knowledge acquisition relies too heavily on a psychological metaphor, and that this is insufficient in broad domains, where geographical and political issues make the expertise more socially situated, because it lacks input from the society in which the knowledge exists. We attempt to provide a methodology which captures this input by introducing a Domain Interface Group to support the knowledge engineer in his/her tasks. This presents a changing role for the knowledge engineer to primarily that of a group facilitator, and we suggest guidelines for brainstorming sessions to facilitate consensus decision making. We advocate the continued use of expert interviews, but suggest ways to improve their productivity. In particular, we attempt to alleviate reductive bias through the use and understanding of domain specific terminology and lexical semantics, during all domain communication and particularly during knowledge acquisition from text. We situate our work in the constructivist modeling paradigm and describe mediating representations which emphasize the importance of human comprehension of the model, for the knowledge engineer, the expert and the end user, above programming considerations. We have undertaken an evaluation of our methodology and an audit of a resulting paper knowledge base, and present the results in an attempt to prove the efficiency, effectiveness and accuracy of our approach.