The role of the individual project in teaching knowledge acquisition

Knowledge acquisition is that stage of knowledge based systems development which is equivalent to the analysis and design phases of the conventional software life cycle. An account is given of the experience gained when teaching a postgraduate course on this topic. One of the aims of the course, "Topics in Knowledge Acquisition", is to provide students with the opportunity to discover for themselves what this stage of the knowledge based system development life cycle involves. Eliciting, analysing and modelling domain knowledge, the main activities of the knowledge acquisition process, are fraught with problems. Each student is asked, therefore, to undertake the task of developing a small expert system in an appropriate domain. The emphasis in this project is not on the implementation but on the processes the students follow. Students are asked, therefore, to evaluate the elicitation, analysis and modelling techniques they use. The paper describes the information available to the students before they commence the project, gives an account of their experiences during the knowledge acquisition stage, discusses their findings and concludes with lessons learned for the future.