"Appreciation", "expertise" and knowledge elicitation: the relevance of Vickers' ideas to the design of expert systems

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the possible contribution of Vickers' ideas on 'appreciation' and what he called the 'appreciative system' to the design of expert systems. The paper begins with a brief summary of the problems of eliciting knowledge from human experts when developing expert systems and the apparent deficiencies of current knowledge eleicitation (KE) techniques. It is suggested that a better understanding of the 'expertise' is fundamental to the deevlopment of more appropriate KE methods. The argument is put forward that what Vickers describes as 'appreciation' can be equated with the process that human beings undergo as they become expert in a particular domain of 'knowledge'.