Knowledge acquisition skills and traits: A self-assessment of knowledge engineers

Abstract

The academic and practitioner literature has suggested that knowledge engineers are critical members of the expert systems development process, which includes knowledge acquisition. In fact, knowledge acquisition has often been cited as being the bottleneck to successful development efforts. Unfortunately, other than normative viewpoints, little attention has been paid to the behavioral and interpersonal skill set and related training of knowledge engineers, especially as pertains to the knowledge acquisition process. This study surveyed 101 persons who are, or have been, actively engaged in knowledge acquisition activities; the intent was to determine their interpersonal skills training, to ascertain their perceptions of how important many behavioral and interpersonal skills are for knowledge acquisition, and to determine how proficient knowledge engineers believe they are in terms of these skills and traits. Results indicate only minimal training in most interpersonal skills. In addition, the results showed that knowledge engineers generally feel less qualified in many of the more important skills, possibly as a result of the lack of effective education and training.