Advances in Knowledge Acquisition and Management

Book excerpt: Since knowledge was recognized as a crucial part of intelligent systems in the 1970s and early 1980s, the problem of the systematic and efficient acquisition of knowledge was an important research problem. In the early days of expert systems, the focus of knowledge acquisition was to design a suitable knowledge base for the problem - main by eliciting the knowledge from available experts before the system was c- pleted and deployed. Over the years, alternative approaches were developed, such as incremental approaches which would build a provisional knowledge base initially and would improve the knowledge base while the system was used in practice. Other approaches sought to build knowledge bases fully automatically by employing machine-learning methods. In recent years, a significant interest developed regarding the problem of constructing ontologies. Of particular interest have been ontologies that could be re-used in a number of ways and could possibly be shared across diff- ent users as well as domains. The Pacific Knowledge Acquisition Workshops (PKAW) have a long tradition in providing a forum for researchers to exchange the latest ideas on the topic. Parti- pants come from all over the world but with a focus on the Pacific Rim region. PKAW is one of three international knowledge acquisition workshop series held in the Pacific-Rim, Canada and Europe over the last two decades. The previous Pacific Knowledge Acquisition Workshop, PKAW 2004, had a strong emphasis on inc- mental knowledge acquisition, machine learning, neural networks and data mining.