The Knowledge Mining Center ? Joachim Klausner , Gerhard

Interviewing experts in order to elicit the knowledge they use in solving problems is a very common task in the knowledge acquisition phase. In practice, interviewing experts is a very tedious and costly task. Surprisingly, up to now there is very little technological support for performing interviews widely available. Recent developments in new hardware and software now provides a signiicantly better technological base to ll this gap. The Knowledge Mining Center is an easy-to-use, yet very exible tool for interviewing. It allows for better presentation of information during interviews by using multimedia technology and online access to information such as design documents or protocols of earlier interviews. Its main advantage, however, is its capability to semi-automatically capture, segment, and annotate information verbally communicated during interviews. The paper motivates the need for technological support for interviewing, discusses design considerations for interviewing tools, describes architecture, functionality, and implementation issues of the Knowledge Mining Center, illustrates its use by an application example, and concludes with a summary of experiences gained so far and our plans for future work.