Situated cognition and knowledge acquisition research

In the early years of knowledge acquisition research there was considerable discussion about the possibility of obtaining knowledge from experts, based on the ideas of situated cognition. The central idea from situated cognition was that knowledge is only ever created in a context and so cannot be used reliably out of context. These ideas seem to have had little impact on most of the knowledge acquisition research that followed, probably because they seemed to be too negative about the possibilities for knowledge-based systems. This paper suggests that situated cognition can be reinterpreted as making the positive suggestion that if people distinguish between different conclusions in different contexts, they do so because they can identify features that distinguish the contexts. This type of case or context differentiation could be readily integrated with a range of knowledge acquisition frameworks, and experience with Ripple-Down Rules suggests that it provides a very simple way for domain experts and others to easily provide a large amount of knowledge for a system. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.