Experience with long-term knowledge acquisition

Evaluation has remained a major challenge for knowledge acquisition and little data is available on how experts actually use knowledge acquisition technology. A number of companies offer Ripple-Down Rules to enable on-going knowledge acquisition and maintenance while a system is in use. One of these companies, Pacific Knowledge Systems has logged user activity over a number of years. Data from these logs demonstrate that domain experts continue to add knowledge to a knowledge base over years. The logs also demonstrate that new knowledge can be added very rapidly regardless of knowledge base size or age. We assume that the on-going knowledge acquisition observed was driven by the need to make changes and encouraged and allowed by the ease of the knowledge acquisition technology used. The question arises of whether experts in other domains would also chose to continue to add knowledge to their knowledge bases if this was supported.