The integrity of the process of eliciting and representing human expertise is fundamental to any knowledge-based system. This process is referred to as "knowledge acquisition." Human expertise can be found in documents and databases that store records of past transactions as well as the guidelines and procedures used to process those transactions. An active area of current research involves "mining" these data to capture knowledge to develop rules for incorporation into knowledge-based systems. This chapter presents a thorough review of current practice in eliciting, representing, and amalgamating knowledge from multiple experts with a focus on the use of graphical representations to support the process. The important points of the discussion are illustrated by presenting a specific methodology for eliciting and combining knowledge from multiple experts. This methodology provides a statistically defensive summarization for assessment. The results of a pilot test of its implementation over the Internet are also presented in the chapter. This chapter concludes with a discussion on the need for knowledge acquisition techniques that permit the quality of the rules developed based on the acquired knowledge to be quantitatively assessed and subsequently embedded into decision support systems.

Two crucial factors for effective emergency response are the speed with which the response strategy is implemented and the quality of the expert knowledge on which the response is based. We propose a method for using communication and computing technologies for eliciting and aggregating the knowledge of multiple, geographically separate experts that improves our ability to address these two issues. In our methodology, we send a description of the problem to the experts who in turn submit graphical representations of the responses they propose for addressing it. The representations are then aggregated into a hypothesized central representation. A cycle of voting then begins from which emerges either a consensus problem representation or a diagnosis of impasse. The result is a clear definition of the response problem for resolution. Results from an implementation of the algorithm over the Internet are presented.

Government-sponsored manufacturing extension services, modeled after cooperative extension, have been established to provide technical and business assistance to small to medium sized manufacturers (SME). Assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of SME has become a necessary diagnostic procedure for manufacturing extension services. One such assessment procedure, QuickView, has clearly demonstrated superior results as a preliminary diagnostic tool