The application of psychological scaling techniques to knowledge elicitation for knowledge-based systems

A formal knowledge-elicitation methodology that incorporates psychological scaling techniques to produce empirically derived knowledge representations is discussed. The methodology has been successfully applied in several domains and overcomes many of the difficulties of traditional knowledge-elicitation techniques. Research issues pertaining to the use of scaling techniques as knowledge-elicitation tools are outlined and a particular issue, the elicitation of levels of abstraction in knowledge representations, is discussed in detail. Results from a study on the elicitation of knowledge about levels of abstraction for a set of Unix commands from experienced Unix users indicated that the representations obtained using this methodology can be used to obtain more abstract (i.e. categorical) representations of that knowledge.