Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The cooperation with cartographers is considerable in some ways [Návrat et al., 2002]:
oriented interview - obtaining of facts,
structural interview - obtaining of terms and models,
free association - obtaining of relation between knowledge,
monitoring - obtaining of global strategy,
comment of steps - obtaining of derived strategy,
dialogue of expert with users - results are interaction between knowledge and way
of communication of user.
The knowledge engineer should be aware that expert knowledge is more than one kind and
not all this knowledge can be acquired from one person. An interview with only one expert-
cartographer can avoid some fail in expert system. Interview with group of cartographers is
better. The suitable way of interview is brainstorming. There is necessary more punctually
prepare interview and carefully lead interview with group of experts. There is also danger
of conflicts between experts.
Process of building expert system in cartography can involve certain steps. Knowledge
acquisition step which involve individual expert interviews, the knowledge representation
step which involve the creation of the knowledge base, knowledge validation occurred
during the testing and fine-tuning of the final knowledge base.
Possible and appropriate method how to collect data can be usage of a modified Delphi
method. The Delphi method [Okoli, Pawlowski, 2004] is a structured and iterative approach
to collecting expert knowledge involving a series of interviews or questionnaires. As
basement for building can be used ontologies. The plan for acquiring the knowledge and
building the knowledge base had the following steps:
have initial free-form interviews with experts;
based on the results of the free-form interviews, develop a questionnaire to collect
knowledge from a larger group of experts;
use the data collected from the questionnaires to create a preliminary knowledge base
to store and represent knowledge;
distribute the preliminary knowledge base through the experts to fine-tune it, repeating
this process if necessary;
use available data and statistical tools to further refine the knowledge base.
The first step in developing the cartographical knowledge base should be to contact experts
with experience in cartography (mostly cartographers). Since this kind of work often
involves a time commitment, it is important to develop a means of motivating experts to
participate in this work [Booker, Meyer, 2001]. Motivation for the experts' participation in
this work is necessary to use the results in the beta testing phase.
Once their expertise is collected, it should be implemented into a draft of knowledge base
rules and stored in an if-then format. This draft should be after fine-tuned by being passed
back to the cartographers for further review. From collected results should be build final
knowledge base and it is necessary to test whole knowledge base for errors after
finalization.
